Haiyan Zhou (Nanjing University), Benjamin Kindler (Columbia University)

Different from the privatized view of reading, in the Chinese cultural field, reading through a certain medium or of a certain artistic form often binds the individual to macroscopic social programs and to the politics of the everyday. In the fourth session of the online lecture series "Practices of Reading in the People's Republic of China", Haiyan Zhou will discuss how the reading of images of labor are linked to the broader image of the global socialist movement presented in newspapers in the 1950s China. The other speaker, Benjamin Kindler, will then discuss the practices of the Chinese literary form “short short story” across a long historical arc, highlighting the extend to which this form dislocates reading from its location in an individual subject, makes room for collective reading, and transforms the contents of everyday life. Prof. Robert Culp (Bard College) will be acting as discussant to this session.