"When we first met, I was surprised that she was so tall, so mouthy, everything in the sky and the earth, and cigarette after cigarette... But after thinking about it, could the author (one) of "Emerging from the Surface of History" be a different kind of look? ”
Under the pen of Peking University professor Hong Zicheng, Dai Jinhua's image comes to life. He described the strong impression he had when he first read Dai Jinhua's book as a "strong" style: decisive and confident, sharp, certain, and aggressive in his position and opinion. This is a necessary character for a scholar who uses social criticism as a support point for his activity and work. However, after reading and interacting more, you will find that this is only one side of the story.
From the 1980s to the 21st century, Professor Dai Jinhua has laid the foundation for his pioneering position and pioneering achievements in the three major fields of domestic film research, feminist criticism and cultural research with three heavyweight works, "Scenery in the Mist", "Floating On the Surface of History" and "Invisible Writing".
Over the years, her research has always traveled through the film, gender and cultural fields, maintaining a high degree of sensitivity and enthusiasm; she has not been tired, has not taken an upward looking posture, but sincerely cares for everything in sight, sees the desire and pain behind the mass phenomenon, remains curious about various subtle changes, and thinks about the rapidly changing current society.
Today, Movable Type Jun shared with book friends an interview with Professor Dai Jinhua in China Reading News.
In order to read a good book, we need to read more
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This article was originally published in the "China Reading News" reporter Shu Jinyu
Dai Jinhua is a Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Peking University and Director of the Center for Film and Culture Studies. At Peking University, students are willing to queue for two hours but ask for a class; in the film circle, she dares to speak up and speak out. She was a former judge of the Golden Horse Awards for Chinese films, and is the most authoritative film critic in the world Chinese today; in terms of gender stance, Dai Jinhua has never hidden her sharp edge, she said, "I am probably the first person in China to stand up and say that she is a feminist." ”
▍Q: You are a very popular teacher at Peking University, do you often recommend books for students?
▍Dai Jinhua: In recent years, every semester I have done cultural research workshops with graduate students who are currently studying and graduating, and I have read books with themes. Basically I came up with a bibliography, the students added, there was discussion, there was a response. In fact, this workshop that I share with students has been interrupted since 1995. Previously, the analysis and discussion of cultural phenomena and film phenomena were intertwined with thematic readings. In the past five years, he has mainly been reading. In five years, I have systematically shared all the important books and students that have had an important impact on me. He also discussed with them various new world theoretical trends and hot spots in the new century. Sometimes focusing on authoritative works of political economy, sometimes focusing on important works of culture or film, fashion theory involves emotion, posthumanism, media and technology, and so on. Outside of class, I don't often share my personal bibliography with my students, one because I love the most, because I am high and low, or I am not elegant, and at the same time, I believe that "I don't have to do what I want."
▍Q: Did you have any goals for the establishment of the workshop? You and your students have gained a lot from it, right?
▍ Dai Jinhua: The original setting was to face the cultural reality in the rapid change together, and try to find new research methods and thinking paths. It is also about learning from and sharing with students the cultural forms that "feed" them. Recently, it is more out of my own basic judgment that the world in the 21st century is facing an unprecedented pattern in the history of civilization, and China is also experiencing an unprecedented period in its own history. In the face of new things, our existing knowledge is more or less invalid, and the existing history can no longer provide precedents that can be invoked. I thought that admitting that we knew nothing was the beginning of our honest understanding of the reality of today's world. I myself was deeply influenced by an advocacy: reading a lot of books and "not seeking much understanding." That was at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s. I myself read a wide range, a very broad range, and I benefit from this. The workshop selection over the past few years is an important book that I hope to share with students in different fields that have had a deep impression of my thinking and scholarship. As a retrospective, as a preparation.
Similar forms of communication are very happy things. The workshop also inspired participants to write and publish a number of quality papers. In fact, the student income may be greater than mine. I provide a bibliography for most of the topics, supplemented by students; in some new fields, students provide bibliographies, and I make a screening. Books recommended by young scholars, such as the communication literature "Qiyun: Media is Existence", helped me to extend my thinking on the new technological revolution and media impact. They also recommend the works of their favorite writers – of course, in terms of literary works, most of their recommendations lag behind my reading, and I can "overwhelm" most experts in all fields of literature.
QiYun: The Medium Exists (John Duheim Peters, translated by Deng Jianguo, Fudan University Press, 2020)
▍Q: What is your judgment and basis for literary works?
Dai Jinhua: This is not something that can be answered by interview capacity. The criteria for judging literature and daily reading are two different things for me. My reading is full of different directions. There is immersion in (pure) literature, the study of theoretical works, and the reading of popular and popular texts in large quantities. In recent years, the reading of a large number of novels of various types on the Internet has become an effective cultural scene for me, and I understand the composition of today's social and cultural psychology, people's love and fear, dreams and escapes from reading. I truly recognized the upheavals in society and intergenerational culture. The rewards went far beyond my reading of relevant sociological investigation and analysis books. In terms of my reading, people often ask where your time comes from. I sympathize with such questioners. Similar reading has never compressed or encroached upon my time reading important works and theoretical works.
▍Q: In fact, I also want to ask you, can you "devour works" in large quantities, presumably there must be a unique reading method?
▍ Dai Jinhua: I have said many times, my own childhood and adolescence have no books to read, every book is a gift from heaven, its stay here may be a night or a few hours, in such a limited time I want to read it too much - to this day, I still read novels are still reluctant to turn directly to the last page, most of the time, I will not give up on an open book halfway, the extreme value and hunger for books forced me to master the ability of speed reading and group reading that people need to learn to acquire later. One novel a night. Of course, I often "ask" students for the way I read the theory, which is generally the same as reading "idle books", just reading it, there will be gains. If you are sitting on your stomach, burning incense and bathing, and preparing various marker pens, you will not be able to finish reading it.
▍Q: But there are also books that are read repeatedly, right?
▍ Dai Jinhua: There are too many books that I have read repeatedly, and when I could first obtain important English academic works, in order to really understand them, I even looked up the dictionary word by word for translation. Most of the [books]] were not published, nor were they published for publication. It's hard to give you a list of books, and to list them doesn't make much sense to me at this time. Because at different stages of my life, many books constituted new knowledge for me at that time—like a certain step too high, I tried to climb it. The importance of these books also gradually weakens as life grows. For example, Christian Mytz's "Cinematic Language", such as Foucault's anthology "Female Sex", such as Lacan's seminar lecture, Bill Nicholson's film reader, oh, the earliest introductory book Frederick Jameson's speech at Peking University... Looking back, it may not be so important and authoritative, but at some point in my time it has become a narrow door that must be passed.
▍ Q: You see so much, so fast, don't you worry about missing something important?
Dai Jinhua: Maybe there are misses, but I believe that I get more. When I was younger, my friends who tested my reading performance did not find that I had important omissions or misses.
▍Q: This is also a talent, right?
▍ Dai Jinhua: More real than talent is the ability given by the hunger for books and knowledge.
▍Q: What do you say you read a lot of popular popular books?
▍ Dai Jinhua: I will read various types of novels, science fiction, detective, romance, beauty... I spent two or three years reading a lot of vampire novels from around the world, and I was able to cover almost all of the vampire sub-genres in film history, including even a large part of the TV series.
▍Q: Don't you feel fear?
▍ Dai Jinhua: If you don't confuse vampires and zombies, you will know that the vampire narrative has horror, but it is more of a pole of romanticism.
▍Q: Is there a purpose for such a large amount of reading? Or is it just pure liking?
▍ Dai Jinhua: Reading a lot is some kind of internal need, and you can't help yourself. But there must be different forms of "likes", and what drives me forward is never "should", not "have". For example, paying attention to vampires, it was the best-selling of "Twilight" at that time that led to a new round of vampire fever, and I first just wanted to do a pop culture observation and analysis. But I was surprised to find out for myself that vampires, like zombies, did not come from ancient legends, but from the invention of early modern Europe. I call it the Enlightenment or rationalism "redundant thing." As an undercurrent of modern Western culture, it actually shows the tension and flaws of modernity's planning itself. The comeback highlights the impact of the new technological revolution on people and "descendants", people and non-people, life and death and "not dead". This is also the meaning of multiple reading. Serious writings mark the frontiers of elite thought, while popular culture is loaded with the true psychological mood of the public. Measuring the gap between the two is one of the focuses of our work.
▍Q: Is it fun to combine academic research with the love of reading?
▍Dai Jinhua: It's not a combination. Instead of combining, I turned what I loved into my academics. My lifelong academic work has been driven by life experience, realistic emotions, and attention spaces, and I probably wouldn't have started without that. I'm probably too willful.
▍Q: Willfulness also requires capital.
Dai Jinhua: If you want to be willful, you must have the consciousness to deal with the cost - whether you are willing to pay the price, whether you can afford the losses that come with it.
▍Q: Have you paid the price too?
Dai Jinhua: Absolutely. Not playing cards according to common sense and playing according to the rules undoubtedly means that resources will not converge on you, and will be lost to some kind of socially recognized success and interests. I know, but I don't want to change.
Throughout my life, I was often reprimanded by good friends and students for not doing what I "should do". This is true, I have probably opened up a lot of fields and topics, but I often "have fun" and are impatient to wait until the time of "monetization". I don't want to force myself, isn't it a bit "Versailles" to say so? But this is the real state.
▍Q: You just said that experts can be "crushed" in the amount of literature read, can you talk about it specifically?
Dai Jinhua: This will probably be an endless list. In my formative years of growth and study, I can say that I have exhausted all the Chinese translations of foreign literature at that time and the contemporary Chinese literature of that time. Since then, attention has been paid to the important works of most important writers. Still being tracked today are Margaret Atwood, Coeche, Haruki Murakami, Ursula Le Quinn... On the contrary, I have also browsed the works of Nobel laureates in recent years, but rarely get the joy of immersion in them.
▍Q: So what kind of works do you think can bring happiness to yourself?
▍ Dai Jinhua: It is nothing more than language charm, structural form, imagination, recognition and expression of the world...
▍Q: You are talking about foreign writers, are there any Chinese writers?
Dai Jinhua: In the 1990s, I spent a lot of time and energy on contemporary Chinese literature, and at that time I almost exhausted the works of important Chinese writers. Research has focused on women writers. But at the turn of the century, instead of continuing the tracking reading of contemporary Chinese writers, I would selectively read according to word of mouth and recommendations: for example, in recent years, Lu Nei, Shuang Xuetao and the Northeast Young Writers Group, or some new works by young female writers.
▍Q: Is it possible to miss a good book by accepting a recommendation?
▍Dai Jinhua: Not so worried. In the Internet era, no one can cover or exhaust any one field of texts and materials. Moreover, I have no intention of becoming an expert in contemporary literature or in any field.
Q: What is the reason from exhausting all the works of important Chinese writers to interrupting track reading?
Dai Jinhua: It's probably just willful. It must be because contemporary literature has gradually returned to literature itself after experiencing overload and social sensational effects in the 1980s. Now they are first and foremost "literary" and secondly socio-cultural. Literary evaluation standards and the logic of literary institutions are its first parameters. Too close to me, at one point, my reading experience was close to self-concentration, or the joys, burnouts, or cynicism of the common little world. And during that time, I read the appeal of encountering a different world and people. It seems that it was then that the full tracking stopped.
▍Question: After reading so many books, is it impossible to count your reading?
▍Dai Jinhua: I did it in junior high school. When I was young, I wanted to know how many books I had read, but then I couldn't continue. Because there are so few books, you can't plan your reading. It seems that in one semester, I finished the limited collection of books in the school library, went to North Map (now the National Library) after class or on weekends, and read a very poor number of books that were open in a year or so. It's a bit ridiculous to think about now, and I've really read it all. Relevant, irrelevant, all. Because it's a book... Some of the books that have been sent today are too late to be unsealed.
▍Q: So many books, how big is the shelf? How to store? How to clean up?
▍ Dai Jinhua: Poke my heart - all my space has been occupied by books, which is not the most tragic. The most tragic thing was that I could hardly find the books I needed, and I had to buy another one when I wanted to use them, because the original book hid "the depth of the book". The bookshelves changed from one to two, and then books filled every crevice. Most of the books I provide to students in the workshop are re-ordered or electronic versions for me, because these books, which are extremely important to me, are buried in the deepest part.
▍Q: At the end of the 1990s, you compiled and selected the contemporary feminist novel collection "The Gate of the Century", and also published "The Boat of Wading: Chinese Women's Writing and Women's Culture in the New Era" and other works focusing on feminism, women's writing, and women's culture. When did you start working on feminism? When did you start to notice the foundational work of feminist literary theory, Mad Woman in the Attic?
▍Dai Jinhua: Let's go to college. My undergraduate thesis was about contemporary Chinese women writers, but I was exposed to women's literary criticism through Beauvoir's Second Sex Literature Volume. In 1989, I published my first monograph on women's literature, "Emerging from the Surface of History", co-authored by Meng Yue and me. But for a long time, "Crazy Woman in the Attic" was just a title, a saying, to me. By 1994, I visited the United States for the first time, and one of the first books I bought in English was Mad Woman in the Attic. I was a little disappointed when I read it, because there have been so many works under its influence, and it has gone deeper and farther. I was no doubt affected by it, but in a very different way than you can imagine today. At that time, the Cold War had not yet ended, China had not yet been fully opened, there was no Internet, the Internet of Things, and many of our European and American knowledge was obtained from fragmentation, second-hand quotations, and even hearsay. As a result, relying on their own understanding and imagination, there are many conjectures and misunderstandings, and thus occasionally become some "creative misreadings". These have formed the hard wounds of me and my generation, and they have also fulfilled our strengths.
Emerging from the Historical Landscape: A Study of Modern Women's Literature (Meng Yue/Dai Jinhua, Peking University Press, 2018)
Republished three times and printed dozens of times, but it was a book without a single annotation—footnotes or endnotes. I really don't feel that this undermines its meaning and value. A birth in a historical period. So I didn't learn feminist literary criticism through Mad Woman in the Attic, but through the prompting of the title, I found different paths into the text of Jane Eyre: Mad Woman, Silent Place, Colonial History, the Wealth Grab and Distribution in the Era of British Capital Accumulation.
The Mad Woman in the Attic: Female Writers and the Literary Imagination of the 19th Century ([Beauty], S.M.Gilbert / [Beauty] Susan Guba, translated by Yang Lixin, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2015)
Q: Not only has it changed your reading experience, but has the study of feminism changed many aspects of you as well?
▍Dai Jinhua: It should be said that it provides a lot of help. Feminism helped me learn that my growing confusion and confusion was not my personal problem. It's not my "fault", it's a common gender encounter. Others admonished: "Learn to be a woman." This confirms from the other side that "female" is not a naturally occurring fact or state. In recent years, my literary reading experience is no longer consciously concerned with the creation of female writers, but will be sincerely close to and immersed in women's writing in the reading experience itself. For example, I have repeatedly recommended "God of Micro-Things", "Signature of All Things", "Blind Assassin" or "Dark Left Hand".
Q: This is also a kind of secret happiness.
▍ Dai Jinhua: I will share this secret happiness out loud.
Q: What about movies? "Yesterday's Island: Dai Jinhua Film Essays" includes your own selection of articles, do you pay special attention to film works related to feminism?
▍ Dai Jinhua: In recent years, the film works of female directors in the world have been very prominent. This year, the work of female directors swept the grand prizes of major international film festivals. It's an amazing change because cinema has always been a male privileged field. Not exactly a joke, but perhaps one side illustrates the depth of the film industry crisis: women are always "ordered to be in times of crisis." Recently, I focused on the works of female directors who have been shortlisted for major international film festivals during the pandemic. There are wonderful works, but at the same time they wonder about the "female characteristics" that are too clear in most works: most works still focus on women and children, wandering on emotions, marriage, childbearing, marriage, and relatively little involvement in other social issues. I don't think of this as a natural limitation, but more like some kind of self-delimitation. I look forward to their approach to all kinds and even all propositions in today's world from a feminine perspective. Women may accomplish a world in another perspective, not just women's films or women's literature.
Screenshot of the course "Gender and Gaze- Master Dai Jinhua's Film Class"
Perhaps, in the past two or three years, my experience of reading the Genre of Beauty in Chinese online novels has reinforced my similar feelings. Because unlike women writing in other spaces, media, or other genres, subtypes, in the online genre of women's writing, male protagonists, and women's reading, women's writing shows that they can write and deal with themes, themes, and genres that were previously mostly controlled by men: politics, military, history, martial arts, science fiction... They can also lift weights to depict and reproduce typical male logic. Similar facts made me try to think and understand the so-called female writing from different angles, and made me more aware of the invisible fence or self-imposed boundaries. Is this the arrival of a worldwide cultural turning point? On the Internet, in the virtual world, gender is just a check to get an ID, and it clearly becomes a role that needs to be played and can be played. And everyone can have multiple IDs, multiple roles. Or is it just a special case of Chinese history? In the generational relationship of the only child, more than one generation of girls grow up under the education of "hoping for a female Jackie Chan" instead of "Cheng Feng", so they form different genders and self-perceptions? I don't have a definitive answer yet.
"Watching fifty selected films, if not enough to change your life, will surely enrich your life." "Movies for Children" edited by Dai Jinhua
▍Q: "Movies for Kids" is an open class for you to give your children a movie, and you have selected 50 classic films to appreciate, and I would like to know your selection criteria.
▍ Dai Jinhua: The premise of compilation is that children should take care of film history, take care of world cinema, take care of and share with children my understanding of film, and the significance of film social and cultural aesthetics. Doomed to hang a leak, 50 is difficult to take care of all aspects. This is a collaboration between me and my "former" students, who have discussed it repeatedly, replacing, adding, deleting, and adjusting countless times, trying to preserve my basic cognition and initial appeal to the greatest extent possible.
I have said countless times about children: young age does not equal low intelligence. I like the phrase I read very early on: "Where are the children?" It's just a little bit. "That's my true understanding of children. I certainly have to take into account social taboos, but that's not the gist of my thinking. The point is: for children, I hope this can be a beginning, a kind of opening list that I am happy to share with them, a door into the art of cinema. We offer one of their many options, an entrance to the first experience of the film.
▍ Q: Hope to encounter more wonderful in the same time.
Dai Jinhua: Yes, there is everything on the Internet, but the problem is that the cultural resources of the Internet belong only to those who know that these resources exist. You have to have a secret code and a password to summon them to appear. Search engines can take you anywhere, but need to enter the correct keywords. When you search for a movie, you can simultaneously get its sequence, its adjacents — if you're really good at using the internet. I hope this list can be a set of keywords for children to discover their own movies, "plural" movies.
▍Q: Can you talk about your pillow book?
Dai Jinhua: My pillow is the Kindle. Reading is the basic content of my life, I don't have a specific reading time, and there are very few books that can stay on my pillow for a long time. I love physical books, but I was also the first to surrender to the Kindle because it offered plenty of weight to carry around. It's funny that film is where my profession and scholarship lie, but the reading of literature is indispensable in my life.
Q: Can you talk about the books you read again and again?
▍Dai Jinhua: Maybe it's because of aging? It may also be that I have read too much, and it is difficult to get surprises and shocks in reading, but I will go back and re-read some famous books and old works. About a few years later, we will read "Weeds", "Dream of the Red Chamber", "War and Peace", "Anna Karenina", "Military Rule 22", "Capital" or "Communist Manifesto"...
▍Q: Why do you make such a request to yourself?
▍ Dai Jinhua: Initially it was just a stumbling block, and rereading becomes a path to perceive, perceive, and change the world. Some works that were deeply loved at that time are boring when re-read; some works that think they are familiar with will have the feeling of never being read before. The surprises and rewards are often greater than reading new works that are well known and popular at the moment. Re-reading War and Peace, together with Anna Karenina, for the first time I discovered and pondered Tolstoy's ideas, their position at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, his connection with Gandhi, the significance of the spread of these ideas in Asia at the time; and the discovery that the protagonists of Anna Karenina were not Anna or Voronsky, but Levin-Tolstoy's self-portrait. Re-reading "Dream of the Red Chamber", you will truly feel the modern value of this book, and feel that Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu are a pair of modern people and modern lovers, different from the male and female protagonists in classical Chinese literature. At the same time, it reflects on the many cultural characteristics and survival dilemmas of modern people and individuals. Re-reading Marx, on the other hand, is constantly recognizing: "He has already said it"—the critique of capitalism that you are trying to unfold is already his precise expression; and it also helps me to understand the changes in the historical structure of the world today.
▍Q: If you want to go to an uninhabited island and only three books are allowed, which three books are you willing to choose?
▍Dai Jinhua: I can't answer similar questions. It must be said that then carefully choose three dictionaries or dictionaries. Otherwise, there is no book to read permanently. Any book will quickly thin in repeated reading. Imagining that there are no books to read will make me shudder.
▍Q: How do you understand "the book becomes thinner and thinner the more you read"?
▍ Dai Jinhua: The real effective reading is to read a book thickly first, and then read it thin. For every valuable book has its subordinate books, ideas, and the sequence and context of writing, its internal and external history, and its conscious or unconscious object of dialogue. It leads you into one world, or travels to another. There is history, knowledge, and expression that it has spoken and that has not been spoken but in fact has become the premise of its speech. In order to know exactly what it is saying, we need to know more. Finally, when you can grasp the author's original statement in this book, you will find that the book is actually very thin. In order to read a good book, we need to read more.