We are very pleased to announce that Jason McGrath, Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Film, has just had two significant achievements, both related to his study of film.
First, Jason’s new book Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age has been published by Stanford University Press (March 2008). Andrew Jones of the University of California - Berkeley has said "This is the most lucid, engaging, and theoretically acute account of contemporary Chinese cultural production to have emerged in recent years from the Western academy."
Second, Jason has just won a McKnight Land-Grant Professorship (2008-2010) for his project “Inscribing the Real: Chinese Cinema from the Silent Era to the Twenty-first Century.� This is one of the University of Minnesota’s most prestigious awards. The major purpose of the McKnight Professorship program is to nurture the careers of the University of Minnesota’s most promising junior faculty members in order to strengthen the faculty for the future. Jason is the only scholar in the Humanities to win the award this year (of 13), and one of only two people in the Humanities in the last three years.
Congratulations Jason, twice.
Jason’s book, Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age, examines Chinese culture under the age of market reforms. Beginning in the early 1990s and on into the new century, fields such as literature and film have been fundamentally transformed by the forces of the market as China is integrated ever more closely into the world economic system. As a result, the formerly unified revolutionary culture has been changed into a pluralized state that reflects the diversity of individual experience in the reform era. New autonomous forms of culture that have arisen include avant-garde as well as commercial literature, and independent film as well as a new entertainment cinema. Chinese people find their experiences of postsocialist modernity reflected in all kinds of new cultural products as well as critical debates that often question the direction of Chinese society in the midst of comprehensive and rapid change.
The name of the project for which he received the McKnight, “Inscribing the Real,� is a literal translation of 写实 (xieshi), a Chinese rendering of the Western term “realism.� For Chinese artists, the term (in fact a neologism borrowed from Japan in the early twentieth century) was intimately linked to modernity itself, and in particular to the concepts of a modern nation and its citizenry. The research project will connect the modern discourse of “realism� in Chinese culture with the debates over cinematic realism in film theory. The latter can shed much light on Chinese film history and its relation to modern Chinese cultural history in general, but at the same time a detailed exploration of the Chinese case will lead to a reevaluation of “realism� in the field of film studies—which, in a globalizing world said to be entering a new “Chinese century�—must expand beyond its basis in American and European film history and allow for the diverse film cultures of non-Western societies to inform its central concepts.
