Notes

This resulted in what is known as the Spring and Autumn period and Warring States periods when the nobles fought each other constantly for supremacy. This resulted in the collapse of the noble ranking system, with the feudally organized society of the Springs and Autumns largely replaced by more bureaucratized states with standing armies, who no longer paid any attention to the Zhou.[9]

- "[Peasants] sometimes erupted onto the political stage in mass movements that can be considered "proto-nationalism" insofar as they were based on ideas and beliefs that in some ways prefigure modern nationalism." (Miller 69)

-"As China fell into warlord anarchy, the outlying parts of the Qing Empire -Mongolia, Tibet, and Machuria- spun out of Chinese control and passed under the influence, respectively, of Russia, Britain, and Japan." (Miller 78)

-"[Sun Yat-sen] established the Guomindang, or National People's Party, and sought help from friendly warlords and sympathetic foregin powers. Nit warlords proved unreliable and no assistance was forthcoming from the West or Japan. [...] With Soviet help, he rebuilt the Guomindang on the model of the Russian Bolshevik Party with its own miltary force" (Miller 78)



-"From this suffocating "iron house," as Lu Xun would later characterize the oppressive reality of traditional China, the Madman lets out his cry of anguish and defiance." (Tang 1222)

-"This shift must take place on two related levels, our understanding of Western modernism itself and our reconstruction of modern Chinese literary history." (Tang 1223)

-"[Xun] postulates kuang as a Nietzschean self-affirmation that provides an essential regenerative energy for any thriving civilization. The word also characterizes talented individuals who contemptuously oppose themselves to a stagnant society and whose actions exceed the public's comprehension." (Tang 1226)

- "Etymologically kuang describes a hound gone wild and assaulting indifferently its master and its master's guests. On the basis of this signification, it has acquired over time a rich texture of meanings, including "madness," "the ecstatic," and "a wildly unrestrained person." (Tang 1226)

-"Kuang is equivalent to "unrestrainedly outgoing, wildly defiant." In Confucius's Analects, it also occurs as a verb meaning to progress or aggress." (Tang 1226)
-Kuangren vs Fengren
Kuang means eccentric and defiant whereas feng denotes being mad, neurotic, or stupid

-"Kuang, unlike feng, is not an aphasic absence of signification but, on the contrary, a discursive energy that erupts and interrupts the normal and normalizing system of meaning. This eruption must necessarily dissolve "the first social censorship-the bar between signifier and signified"-to break down the socially instituted symbolic order and keep the signifying process motile. [...] [The Madman's] kuang indicates a return of that which has been excluded or obliterated from the horizon of allowed or conceivable experience. It represents a transgressive discourse not only because it goads the self-conscious subject to challenge the given boundaries but also because it drives the subject himself to all the limits, all the frontiers, of experience." (Tang 1226)

-" Opinions differ greatly, sometimes seeming irreconcilable, but the general consensus holds that the Madman is depicted realistically to expose feudalism as essentially barbaric cannibalism. [...] at "Lu Xun pictures, in a highly realistic manner, the essence of a feudalist social system and reveals feudal moral rituals and teachings to be cannibalistic" (Wang Shiqing 88)." (Tang 1227)

-" The Madman sets out to consult history hoping to obtain an answer to his present concern. He wants to reach out and grasp some certainty about the meaning and purpose-in short, the rationality-of the present." (Tang 1228)

-" Every such rereading must first disclose the violence and barbarism that went into establishing a previous representation of the real as either true or natural. The Madman's insertion of the two words "Eat humans," therefore, signals a revolutionary return of the repressed to the discursive field. It is not merely a contention over the possession of the past but a struggle to own the present, which for the Madman is a matter of life and death. [...] for the Madman, the dominant value system that legitimizes repression and barbarism in the name of "virtue and morality. [...] its beginnings were, like the beginnings of everything great on earth, soaked in blood thoroughly and for a long time." (Tang 1229)

-" Through the preface narrator assumes an aesthetic tranquillity and an equally detached scientism, he nevertheless judgmentally excludes the Madman's diary from the order of reality. He expresses the common view of paranoia as a disorder that, one hopes, can be cured." (Tang 1230)

-"What Lu Xun achieves in "Diary of a Madman" is a critical recognition of an impossible promise of realist fiction. Lu Xun realizes, through his self-conscious play with his own storytelling, that realism "risks making authors accomplices to the social cruelty they intend to decry. The realist narrative, by imitating at a formal level the relation of oppressor to oppressed, is captive to the logic of that oppression and ends by merely reproducing it." (Tang 1231)

-"Lu Xun wrote, not without bitter sarcasm, that "the first awakened has always been, by either a malicious person or a mindless crowd, oppressed, persecuted, conspired against, exiled, and eventually murdered." (Tang 1231)


-"History is that which can never be undone. The children must be saved from being severed from the past, however nightmarish it
may be, and also from being devoured by the historically determined present. One keeps history alive and dead, present and removed, at the same time by continuously rereading and re-writing it. By reading and rereading the past-as a text, as a space filled up with tension and forces-one can distance it so that it both intervenes in and yet submits itself to the present." (Tang 1232)