Playthings of History

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art ›› 2015, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (3): 16-24.

• Modern and Contemporary Literary Theory and Criticism • Previous Articles Next Articles

Playthings of History

Andrew F. Jones; Translators: Wang Dun, Zheng Yiren

Chinese in UCLA Berkeley the School of Liberal Arts; Renmin University of China the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations; University of Chicago

Online:2015-05-25 Published:2015-07-10
About author:Andrew F. Jones, (PhD. UCLA, Berkeley), is a professor and Louis B. Agassiz Chair in Chinese in UCLA Berkeley. His research interests include music, cinema, and media technology, modern and contemporary fiction, children's literature, and the cultural history of the global 1960s. Wang Dun, (PhD. UCLA, Berkeley), is an associate professor of Chinese in the School of Liberal Arts, Renmin University of China, with research interests in early modern Chinese narrative and contemporary Chinese culture and society. Zheng Yiren is a PhD student at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the representations of women's travels, pre-modern childhood, orality and literacy in the Ming-Qing Chinese literature.

Abstract

Abstract: The 1930s Republican China exhibited a historically determinate and pervasive cultural logic in which children and commodities were consistently linked together as part of a larger narrative of national development. This is attested by the visual and narrative logic of Sun Yu's film Playthings. Often lauded as a classic of Shanghai cinema, Sun Yu's film narrates China's national salvation by way of a seemingly unlikely figure: toys. Released on National Day in 1933 and promoted in the popular press as a call to arms, this particular "toy story" — which focuses on a Chinese toy maker's struggle for survival in the face of imperialist economic encroachment and Japanese military invasion — ingeniously plays on the metonymic relation between toys and the things they represent in order to treat two sociopolitical questions persistently and passionately debated in the popular culture and public discourse of the 1930s: the making of modernized Chinese children, and the evolution of industrial China.

Key words: children, national product, development, evolution, modern literature

Andrew F. Jones, Wang Dun, Zheng Yiren. Playthings of History[J]. Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art, 2015, 35(3): 16-24.

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Playthings of History

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