Convincing character development suffers at the hands of this exaggeration. In 2000, the British literary critic James Wood coined an infectious new term, "Hysterical Realism", to describe bull<y, zany contemporary Anglophone novels written by authors such as Thomas Pynchon, Don Delillo, Zadie Smith or David Foster Wallace: "books that know a thousand things but do not know a single human being."By vandalising plausibility through their perpetual chaotic motion, Wood felt, these novels destroy the possibility of meaningful ethical utterance. He pleaded instead "for novels that tell us not 'how the world works' but 'how somebody felt about something' - indeed, how a lot of different people felt about a lot of different things (these are commonly called novels about human beings)" (Wood 2001).
Although Wood was referring to British and American writers, his criticisms could equally be applied to the style of fiction favoured by China s most acclaimed novelists, who abandon them- selves to the riotous tragicomedy of modern Chinas transformations, piling (at great length) outrageous event upon outrageous event, picaresque character upon picaresque character, without deepening our knowledge of any one individual.
From: Finding a Place: Mainland Chinese Fiction in the 2000s
Author(s): JULIA LOVELL
Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 71, No. 1 (FEBRUARY 2012), pp. 7-32
Although Wood was referring to British and American writers, his criticisms could equally be applied to the style of fiction favoured by China s most acclaimed novelists, who abandon them- selves to the riotous tragicomedy of modern Chinas transformations, piling (at great length) outrageous event upon outrageous event, picaresque character upon picaresque character, without deepening our knowledge of any one individual.
From: Finding a Place: Mainland Chinese Fiction in the 2000s
Author(s): JULIA LOVELL
Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 71, No. 1 (FEBRUARY 2012), pp. 7-32
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