To Mark the 100th Anniversary of Lu Xun’s A Madman’s Diary

 

Lu Xun’s or the World’s Madman

Speakers: Roman Shapiro (Russia); Emily Mae Graft (Germany); Taku Kurashige (Japan); Raman Sinha (JNU); Senno Takumasa (Japan); and H.L. Kim (Korea)

 

Moderator: Hemant Adlakha, Jawaharlal Nehru University

 

Lu Xun, who wrote under the pen name of Zhou Shuren, was the most influential fiction writer in modern Chinese history. Lu Xun was part of the New Culture Movement of the 1910s, which essentially tried to pull China out of imperial times and into the modern age. He studied in Japan to become a doctor, but then famously decided that it was the minds, not the bodies, of the Chinese people that needed to be cured – through literature. Mao Zedong called him the sage of modern China. A Madman’s Diary is one of Lu Xun’s best-known short stories, written in 1918 about the inability to see reason

 

(Collaboration: Centre for Chinese & Southeast Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University; and Institute of Chinese Studies)