Fractured perspectives and visions: literary representations of Chinese intellectuals in Post-Mao fiction

While the socio-political and economic upheavals of Post-Mao China have been explored extensively and in great detail, albeit largely within clichéd East-West paradigms, the intellectual and cultural landscape and its major critical fault lines have attracted much less interest and are, as far as the West is concerned, at best known in their misty contours or what Zhang Xudong calls "the incompleteness, messiness and openness of Chinese modernity". The proposed paper attempts to elucidate the artistic representation of the Chinese intelligentsia in Post-Mao fiction as critical trigger for new modes of critical inquiry and the "constructive deconstruction" of outmoded visions (paradigms) of modern Chinese consciousness and cultural spiritual fabric myth