Body rhetoric

Author: Xie Youshun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-06-01
Features: There is a joke in the literary world that goes: if you can't write poetry, you can write novels; if you can't write novels, you can write essays; if you can't write essays, you can engage in theory; if you can't handle theory, you can do criticism; and if you can't do criticism, you're basically done for—it's like in football, if you can't play in the Jia A league, you go to the Jia B league. This joke contains a corrupt notion of genre hierarchy. As long as there is hierarchy, there is power struggle. Every genre tries to occupy the central position of the literary world. The evolution of ancient Chinese literary genres actually hides a history of discourse power struggles.