Cultural Revolution still significant in contemporary Chinese culture
LEXINGTON, Ky. — Dr. Bert Scruggs, an expert in modern Taiwanese literature and film, concludes this year’s Creative Intelligence lecture series with “Rusticated Memories and Consuming Environments: Zhiqing Fiction and Film,” an examination of the effects of China’s Cultural Revolution. Scruggs, assistant professor of East Asian languages and literature at the University of California, Irvine, will speak Thursday, May 8, at 4:15 p.m. in the Cowgill Center, room 102, on Transylvania University’s campus. The talk is free and open to the public. Beginning in the 1950s, and until the end of the Cultural Revolution, educated youth in the People’s Republic of China willingly, or under coercion, left the densely populated urban areas and moved to the countryside where they worked as farmers or manual laborers as part of their revolutionary education. Despite having been “sent-down youth” or “rusticated” over 30 years ago, memories of rustication continue to garner critical and artistic attention, as evidenced in contemporary Chinese literature and film. “Due to the massive nature of the rustication program—17 million people—few lives or families in contemporary China have not been directly influenced by the program that sent a generation to the hinterlands to educate, re-educate, reclaim and tend to the land,” explains Scruggs. For his presentation, Scruggs compares Liang Xiaosheng’s 2009 short story “A Land of Wonder and Mystery,” a rusticated-youth narrative, to Sean Penn’s film adaptation of Jon Krakauer’s book “Into the Wild,” among other texts. He posits that
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