Refashioning Print Literature:

In addressing the issue of modern China and world literature in the age of globalization, we should not neglect this fact: in contemporary Chinese society as well as elsewhere, the elite literary market has been increasingly shrinking, with more and more readers reading online rather than in the libraries, for there have appeared numerous netizens who write and publish online. I think it's hard to say whether or not the Internet will ruin or contribute to the popularization of serious literature: a lot of print literature, chiefly serious literature, is likely to be published on the Internet, but although that means fewer books will be printed on paper, it also means that it will possible for more and more readers to get access to serious literature, including translated world literature online. Since translated literature comprises a large part of the literary market, Internet writing might well contribute a bit to the popularization of world literature in China as well. But my concern in this article is the extent to which the Internet will help to popularize literature.Obviously, the emergence of the Internet in our daily lives provides us with a new way to communicate and express our feelings and opinions. As a global system of interconnected computer networks, the Internet connects billions of users (or their computers) worldwide by using the standard Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). Thus, for most users, it is the first time that they have not been limited by space and time in communicating with others, and they now have the opportunity to know other people's (public or private) stories and share their experiences in just a matter of seconds. Speed changes everything and makes things go more smoothly in our lives. Not only do the younger generations like to communicate online, but even the older scholars are gradually taking interest in communicating through the Internet.Actually, many years ago, in the face of a challenge raised by the emergence of new media to traditional literature, Jacques Derrida pointed out that “an entire epoch of so-called literature, if not all of it, cannot survive a certain technological regime of telecommunications (in this respect the political regime is secondary). Neither can philosophy, or psychoanalysis. Or love letters.”1 At the time he expressed this worry, many people did not understand what the Internet was or even suspect that his prediction would come true. But today, we, humanities scholars and intellectuals cannot but be confronted with this fact. However, although Derrida may have recognized that love letters and print culture, including print technology, literary system, and books on which love letters depend, are challenged and reshaped by new communication technologies and media such as the computer and the Internet, he could not have known that these new technologies would sooner or later bring something new to literature, as he did not foresee what kind of new literary possibilities would emerge from the ruins of print. Several different but overlapping types of literature have emerged as computer technology has improved and the Internet has grown. For example, hypertext fiction, network fiction, and interactive fiction in the United States, generative and animated art in Europe (referred to in general as “electronic literature”), cell phone novels in Korea and Japan as well as Internet literature in China (not only in mainland China but also in many other Chinese-speaking societies). This article however, mainly focuses on what has been going on in mainland China in recent years.Over the past decade, Internet literature has indeed accomplished remarkable achievements. Internet literature has garnered a readership of 202.67 million, amounting to 39.5 percent of all netizens in mainland China now.2 That 55.5 percent of these netizens are between the ages of twenty and forty indicates that Internet literature is clearly very popular with young people, which is surprising nowadays considering that there are so many forms of entertainment available to them. Although Internet literature has developed rapidly, it is not only accepted as a part of mainstream contemporary literature but also plays an increasingly important role in literary creation, theory, and criticism in mainland China, and having become the focus of literary and cultural critics, it is considered to be the fastest growing field in literary research. Financially speaking, Internet literature has undoubtedly been successful, bringing big profits to the commercial websites that sponsor it as well as to its writers. For these reasons, we can say that the rise of Internet writing has not brought about the death of serious literature but rather has opened it up to new possibilities that are helping it survive the severe challenges presented by new media outlets. Many contemporary Chinese writers, including Wang Meng, one of the most famous novelists, cannot produce their works without using a computer. We could even say that the rise of the Internet in China has actually brought about a revolution in literary production and circulation, including the circulation of world literature, as almost all the world masterpieces are now available on the web.Apparently, the success of Internet literature contributes to the movement and popularization of computers, and the Internet has reshaped the way of writing, reconfiguring the relations between author, reader, and text as an interactive and dynamic system while also providing a virtual platform for everybody to publish and share their feelings and thoughts without the limitation of the rules of publishing and editing. More deeply, Internet literature has changed the ecology of literature in mainland China as a revolutionary power. That is, Internet literature has refashioned the once dominant print literature with the help of computers and Internet writing and publishing. However, the relation between new media outlets and literature reveals several paradoxes behind the success of Internet literature. People seem to believe that literature is being liberated, but they still insist on print literature, emphasizing the importance of technology and yet reducing it to a simple tool or platform. In addition, they depend on commercial power to promote the development of Internet literature, which in turn leads to literature's return to print. These factors have undoubtedly prevented Internet literature from becoming a real electronic literature.As J. Hillis Miller has pertinently pointed out, “These new telecommunications technologies, so many new devices for raising ghosts in a new way, also generate new ideological matrices.”3 Miller thinks that moving back to the paradigm of “world literature” would be a good response to this trend, to the “coming community” created by the new telecommunications technologies. He also offers us some suggestions for reconfiguring the discipline of comparative literature in the world. “It is better,” he notes, “to read and teach The Dream of the Red Chamber in translation than not to read it at all.”4 It is true that anyone can read literary works from different countries online, largely in English translation. Miller himself is said to have read lots of Chinese literary works in English. As for Internet literature, I want to follow the suggestion made by Miller and say that although new technologies or medias have crossed the borders of countries, the result of the interaction between them and writing, text, and culture, like Internet literature, finds its roots in the concrete context of culture and society.In this article, I first briefly review the history of Internet literature in China and then consider what Internet literature means to us, how it overlaps and diverges from print literature, what its the newness implies, what kind of strategies characterize it, and how we should understand this literary process in the Chinese context.The earliest Chinese Internet literary works are generally thought to be the prose, poetry, and fiction published in the China News Digest (华夏文摘) (www.cnd.org), an online journal that first used Chinese characters in 1991, when the Internet was not available in China and was still relatively unknown by the majority of people in the West. Most of the early contributors were Chinese students studying in the United States. Through it they were able to express their feelings of homesickness by writing and reading articles in Chinese.Meanwhile, this journal also became a channel for getting news from China because it republished articles from Chinese newspapers and magazines. Strictly speaking, it now seems more like the digitalization of print articles because they follow the linear mode of writing, and none of them use the multimedia or provide interactive functions for readers. Nevertheless, the China News Digest provided a free space and platform for its users, readers, and writers, giving rise to the earliest model of Internet literature, one grounded in cooperation between contributors and administrators. On the one hand, contributors, especially the writers (as opposed to the readers), were encouraged to post their original articles freely, and some of them, such as Tu Ya (图雅) and Fang Xhouzi (方舟子) (who are viewed as the first generation of authors promoting Internet literature), became famous. On the other hand, administrators had the exclusive authority to choose articles that met their standards. Some writers were dissatisfied with this procedure, however, which led them to quit.With the development of Chinese websites in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and mainland China, more and more people now have access to the Internet and can post their articles online. In fact, it was the success of one novel in particular that allowed Internet literature to become widely known to people throughout the country. This milestone work is The First Time of Intimate Touch by Cai Zhiheng (蔡智恒; ID is Pizicai, 痞子蔡), a PhD student in the Department of Hydraulic and Ocean Engineering at the National Cheng Kung University in Taiwan. It is a tragic love story that takes place on the university campus; apparently it was based on his real-life experiences, and so it is difficult to say that there is any sort of innovation as the plotline is quite conventional. However, because the story features the lovers' virtual communication on the bulletin board systems (BBS) and in chat rooms and includes dialogues mixed with Internet slang, this novel won the hearts of numerous netizens in a very short time. After achieving great popularity online, the novel was published in print and was hugely successful in mainland China as well. With this, Internet literature as a proper term and a genre of literary writing became familiar to and accepted by the broad masses of people.At almost the same time, from 1997–1999, several young writers, such as Lu Jinbo (路金波 ID is Li Xunhun, 李寻欢), Chen Wannin (陈万宁; ID is Ning Caishen,宁财神), Xing Yusen (邢育森; ID is Lover), and Li Jie (励婕; ID is Anni Baobei, 安妮宝贝), who produced original stories and posted them on BBSs became famous in various online communities. All of their personal histories have several common characteristics: they first obtained Internet access when they were undergraduate students; most of them did not have much interest in writing before they started to write literary works online; all of them admitted that the encouragement of readers was the most important factor in their continuing to write at that time; and some of them did not even think that their writings belonged to Internet literature. The contents of their stories also have something in common in that they are based on their own experiences in universities and employ a lot of Internet slang, which was very popular in those days. As a result, by today's standards, these works can be viewed as rather naïve and immature.Interestingly enough, recalling the reason why he and others wrote such stories, Xin Yusen said that “in the 1990s, many people hadn't read literary works at all. But the speed of dial-up is very slow so you can't do anything except write. The Internet, allowing for free creation and publication, aroused my enthusiasm for writing.”5 This sentiment is in fact repeated by many writers of the second generation. For most of these writers, their interests, rooted in their hearts and abilities, motivate their writing, as well as feedback and comments from readers supported by the comment function of BBSs or discussion forums. During this period, the model of Internet writing grounded in cooperation between writer and administrator changed with the development of web technology. In addition to the millions of online discussion forums, numerous online publishers of Internet literature emerged that posted the works of young writers as well as digitalized versions of printed classical works. Writers had more choices as to which websites to publish on and even began building their own website to publish their own works. At the same time, these websites also wanted to attract more writers to post more original articles to promote their reputations. The efforts made by both sides brought a period of prosperity to Internet literature; some famous writers even made their own contributions to online communities, and numerous works were widely distributed by all kinds of Internet literature sites.In 2004, a Chinese Internet literature website named Qidian (起点中文网) was purchased by the Shanghai Shengda Network Development Co. Ltd. This marked the dawn of the commercialization of Internet literature. This company designed an entirely new commercial model for reading: the VIP reading model. Its uniqueness lies in the fact that the website makes a contract with the author that states that the first part of the author's work can be read for free but that users must pay to read thereafter (they can either pay by the chapter or as they read, based on their interests). The writing, publishing, and sale of the work along with reader response to it is scheduled by the minute, and the author and reader interact in real time. Authors receive 50–70 percent of the profits each month, and they hold the copyright in their works. As of 2008, Qidian had 220,000 original works, 14,000,000 registered users, and 150,000 authors.6 Needless to say, it has become the model for the commercialization of Internet literature.In the past decade, the of Internet literature has been a to the of literary the of Internet literature is than that of electronic literature. literature is considered to print literature that has been and is by a created on a computer and to be read on a However, print literature is accepted as a kind of Internet literature. It is and can only be read on of Internet literature includes works published in print before the new media age that have been as well as those created and published on a computer and on the Internet and then the computer and the Internet have now become the most popular writing and it is not difficult to contemporary printed works. 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But as we even writing and publishing has become a mode of that cannot be The of Internet literature can only be through this article, I would like to briefly the of what Internet literature means to the rise of world literature, especially in this I would to write article, but I just my In my Internet literature by be the of world literature, although it has challenged print literature, including world literature in print. However, all of the world masterpieces and modern and contemporary works are available now online, from to short stories, and even works. People can get access to these works without going to or can also get various to these works. In these the Internet has undoubtedly a role in promoting world literature, it known to common readers. In addition, any of works may be by literary scholars as more and more serious writers write their works on the computer and publish them first online. with time, a of them may well be in of world literature. The popularization of Internet literature is by means a