ABSTRACT
In recent years, after the theoretical debate on the question of postmodernism and postmodernity in the Chinese context, discussing the issue of modernity of both the West and China has become another theoretical topic for us Chinese literary scholars and intellectuals, especially with regard to the issue of postmodernism or postmodernity of Chinese characteristics. We are now in a new century, as well as a new millennium. What is characteristic of our age? Obviously, different scholars, from their own perspectives, have described it in different ways. In my view, it is certainly appropriate to call the present time an age of globalization which has already manifested itself in many fields, even in our field of literary and cultural studies in the Chinese context. 1 In such an age, intellectuals, writers, critics and literary and cultural studies scholars cannot but take pains to conceive or picture the future orientation of culture and its elite form of literature since elite literature is confronted with severe challenges from popular literature and culture, and literary studies is confronted with the challenge of Cultural Studies. As a Chinese scholar dealing both with comparative literature and culture studies, what I am concerned about most is the new orientation of Chinese literature studies, or more specifically, of contemporary Chinese literature studies as this sub-branch of Chinese studies is more closely related to the age of globalization, in which we can first observe modern Chinese literature in a broad context of world literature and reach a rewriting of contemporary Chinese literary culture from an international and comparative point of view. Of course, when I mention literature or literary studies in general, I simply refer to elite or canonical literature and its studies.
