21st Century Map of Chinese Culture · Volume 3

Author: Author Country: China
Editor-in-Chief: Zhu Dake, Zhang Hong
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-09-01
Features: We are like the mapmaker K in Kafka's works, lost in the midnight of the spirit of the times, unable to find our hotel. We struggle to search for our "map," looking for the exit of the spiritual labyrinth, but we cannot guarantee where that exit points to......
The collection includes three parts:
- Thematic articles, divided into five themes, including "Literary Criticism," "Mass Culture Criticism," "Film and Television Criticism," "Art Criticism," and "Music Criticism";
- Cultural keywords, a brief exploration of the popular terms in 2004 that reflect social psychological trends and hidden desires of the masses;
- Cultural events, documenting the various cultural events in 2004 that captured public attention, from the distribution of topics proposed by representatives at the National People's Congress to Guo Jingming's continued performance of the publishing and reading myth.
Cultural criticism is a new form of writing. It continues the tradition of intellectuals engaging in social critique but no longer relies on academic-style professional writing. Instead, it adopts a more individualistic and unconstrained approach to address mass media.
This year marks the third volume of The Cultural Map. The editors' intention is to select and excerpt various cultural criticism articles from the previous year, reviewing and organizing the trends and flows of contemporary Chinese social and cultural phenomena. The title "map" is borrowed from Walter Benjamin's metaphor, aiming to present a cultural landscape in progress in an era that has lost its overall sense of order. Of course, it is also possible that the opposite will happen—readers may only find a world that has lost more meaning and a coordinate system.