Deleuze and Chinese “Pure Literature”: Literary Worlding from History to Becoming
probes into the potentialities of a new conception of literature obscured by the critical ambivalence in China’s literary field around the turn of the century. With the help of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy, this book articulates many of the latent social, political, and cultural ideas embedded in “pure literature” subsisting as a literary sensibility waiting to be expressed. The specific practices and works of “pure literature” analyzed in the book also serve as instances of what Deleuze’s creative concepts can address, testing and fleshing out their efficacy. Identifying shared problem-solving areas between Deleuze’s philosophy and Chinese “pure literature,” Jian Xu uses them to shed light on the hidden edges of Chinese “pure literature.” Through such Deleuzian theses as the immanence of becoming, the need of the nonhistorical, the virtual real and pure event, the ills of representationalism, becoming-minoritarian, becoming-woman, becoming-imperceptible, pre-individual singularities, and so forth, the book sets about creating a new critical vocabulary to help “pure literature” become self-conscious of its own political creative potentials.