The Modern Idea of History in Chinese Interpretations of the Past:
The Case of Zhang Taiyan and Lu Xun

Ban Wang
Rutgers University

Along with deepening social and cultural crises at the turn of the 20th-century, China was undergoing drastic changes from the traditional social foundation to a modem society. The epochal change amidst the clashing encounter and intense transaction between Chinese and Western thoughts and cultural systems radically affected the traditional conceptual episteme in general and the received hermeneutic practice in particular. This paper will focus on the way the modern, Enlightenment notion of history affected and worked through Chinese interpretations of history and the cultural past.

The Enlightenment notion of history conceives human activity through time as a developmental, teleological, and purposeful process and as a course of action working towards a better, freer humanity. This notion, though idealistic, also offers a strong, material sense of historicity, the idea that a cultural or textual formation of a period is not simply continuous with its precedents, safely embedded within the internal logic of its evolution, but also get altered and re-configured by specific historical contingencies. Thus conceptual frameworks and interpretative methods began to be seen more radically as conditioned by historical accidents, power relations, and “alien” forces. This sense of historicity enabled the Chinese literati and modern intellectuals to push beyond the confine of the classical texts to attempt an interpretative exercise that is historically informed and politically sensitive.

Focusing on Zhang Taiyan and Lu Xun’s reflective essays on Chinese history and tradition, this paper will test out the above hypothesis concerning the historical turn in the Chinese hermeneutic practice. I will explore the way both writers worked their sense of modern history into their interpretation and re-articulation of literary texts as well as writings centered on history.