ICLS Graduate Student Colloquium presentation by:

Lei Lei (EALAC and ICLS)

The aim of this Colloquium, which will take the format of a workshop series, is for students who have not yet reached the M.Phil. stage and/or submitted their dissertation prospectus for review to present earlier work that may contribute to the development of the prospectus, as well as to work through comments and constructive criticism with peers. Work that could be presented for a workshop in this series might include seminar papers or conference papers or, indeed, new work which students wish to develop toward their dissertation prospectus.

Ms. Lei’s topic:

The language of Darwinian evolution became popularized in China with Yan Fu’s acclaimed translation of T. H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics in 1897. Spanning between 1897 when Yan Fu published Tianyan lun to 1922 when Lu Xun wrote “Some Rabbits and a Cat”, a globalizing narrative of Western science was taking shape. Although Chinese intellectuals such as Lu Xun, Yan Fu and many others appeared to be participating in this process of globalizing evolutionary science by employing terms such as evolution, struggle, natural selection, and survival of the fittest, this paper argues their projects actually diverges from that process. They deposited new meanings into the repository of “evolution” and turned it into a new amalgam signifying not just the gradual physical changes happening to species, but also agency, morality, metaphysics and claims of authority. Similarly, nature for them did not just mean “things in themselves”, but was always already connected to human subjectivity and collectivity. This paper looks at Lu Xun as an anchoring figure whose writing both engages and critiques a variety of evolutionary theories on the laws of nature and the position of human beings in nature. Lu Xun’s short story “Some Rabbits and a Cat”(1922) allows Darwinian laws of nature, human subjects and politics to play out in literary incidents where the integrity of the ambiguity embodied in life is protected from the theoretical abstraction and reduction. Furthermore, it explores the recursive relationship between nature and humans and allows the renegotiation of such relationships beyond what the discourse of nature and the positivism of science can tell us.  The second part of the essay covers Lu Xun’s encounter with Yan Fu’s Tianyan lun 天演论(On Evolution). In Tianyan lun, Yan Fu shuns the scientific understanding of “nature” and its “laws” by insinuating different epistemological claims into his rendering of Thomas Huxley and Herbert Spencer. Although Yan Fu claims Tian yanlun is a translation of Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics, the richness and complexity of the work can only be made sense of if we understand that Yan Fu uses the translation as a form of disguise for his own thoughts and that he seeks to wrap his own ideas in the prestige of a English work.