Crisis of History, Crisis of Representation: Zhang Kangkang's "Collective Memory" and Other Examples of "Historiographical Metafiction" in Chinese Avant-Garde Literature

If history has been defined as a crucial element to construct national identity, what happens when its reliability is contested? In China, despite having been considered for a long time as an instrument of propaganda, narrative’s relative freedom of re-elaboration, as Dutrait (1989) suggested, has covered an essential function in the process of reflection on historiographic processes. The paper considers some literary works belonging to what Linda Hutcheon (1988) defined as “historiographical metafiction”: novels and short stories by a variety of different authors, all characterized by intertextuality and an explicit reflection on the process of writing literature and history, as well as by a questioning of the meaning and truthfulness of memory. It proposes an overview on some of those texts, and a specific focus on Zhang Kangkang’s short story “Collective Memory” (Jiti jiyi 集体记忆, 2000), showing how, by suggesting a reshaping of the “imaginary mirror” that history is in China today, they open questions on the topics of historical traumatism, memory, and writing.

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