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By examining how narrative strategies reinforce or contest deterministic paradigms, this work describes modern Chinese fiction's unique contribution to ethical and literary debates over the possibility for meaningful moral action. How does Chinese fiction express the desire for freedom as well as fears of attendant responsibilities and abuses? How does it depict struggles for and against freedom? How do the texts allow for or deny the possibility of freedom and agency? By analyzing discourses of agency and fatalism and the ethical import of narrative structures, the author explores how representations of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the twentieth century. She links these changes to representations of time and to enduring commitments to human-heartedness and social justice. Although Chinese fiction may contain some of the most disconsolate pages in the twentieth century's long literature of disenchantment, it also bespeaks, Knight argues, a passion for freedom and moral responsibility. Responding to ongoing conflicts between the claims of modernity and the resources of past traditions, these stories and novels are often dominated by challenges to human agency. Yet read with sensitivity to traditional Chinese conceptions of moral experience, their testimony to both the promises of freedom and the failure of such promises opens new perspectives on moral agency.
Author
Sabina Knight (桑稟華) seeks to bring Chinese literatures to broader audiences. Her Chinese Literature: A Very Short Introduction (2012) tells the story of literary culture’s key role in the development and resilience of Chinese social and political institutions. From ancient historical records through the region’s early modernization and globalization, the book embraces traditional Chinese understandings of literature as encompassing history and philosophy as well as poetry and poetics, storytelling, drama and the novel. Knight's earlier book, *The Heart of Time* (2006), offers a history of modern Chinese fiction to explore how narrative structures, representations of time, and understandings of determinism and moral responsibility changed over the 20th century. *https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5... Working in Chinese, Russian, French and English, Knight also teaches and writes in the cross-cultural medical humanities. Her talks and articles have addressed breast cancer, emotions, disability, aging and well-being. This work builds on 10 years’ participation in a faculty seminar sponsored by Harvard’s departments of medical anthropology and social medicine. Knight continues as a research associate at Harvard’s Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Knight has translated stories, essays, classical poetry and modern prose. She has published essays in Chinese on Chinese-English literary translation, and she has spoken widely on the topic in China, Europe and the United States. Her hope that literary culture may be relevant to contemporary questions of law, public policy and healthcare has grown since she began in 2011 as a fellow in the Public Intellectuals Program (PIP) of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations (NCUSCR). In 2007, Knight was awarded Smith’s Sherrerd Prize for Distinguished Teaching.
