Professor Shunzhu Wang asked to judge creative writing contest in China

Dr. Shunzh Wang, an associate professor of Chinese in Rider's Department of Languages, Literatures & Cultures (LL&C), recently served as a judge for a Chinese writing contest alongside preeminent scholars and writers from around the globe, including a Nobel Peace Prize winner. 

The first annual Peking University Peiwen Cup National Youth English Creative Writing Contest focused on cultivating creative thinking and writing among Chinese teenagers with a stress on global perspectives, cultural diversity and consciousness of equality.

Other judges included J.M. Coetzee, South African novelist, essayist, translator and recipient of the 2003 Nobel Prize in Literature; Dr. John Blair, professor emeritus of American Literature and Civilization at University of Geneva, Switzerland; Dr. David Damrosch, Ernest Bernbaum Professor and Chair of Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard; and Dr. Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in Humanities from Columbia University. 

“I am very humbled and honored to be invited to this group,” says Wang, a prolific writer and researcher, as well as a devoted teacher. Prior to coming to Rider in 2008, he taught for eight years at Bennington College. At Rider, he has taught a wide variety of courses, ranging from Chinese language, calligraphy, culture and literature in the LL&C department, to honors seminar courses and classes in gender and sexuality studies, political science and global studies. 

Students were asked to submit their writing online focused on two subjects, “My Dream” or a story that begins with, “There are three children sitting on a log by the stream. One of them looks up at the sky and says …” Over 10,000 online submissions were narrowed down to 200. Those 200 students were then invited to Beijing for the final on-site competition for the first, second or third places. The two topics for the final essay were, "If I could choose my future/own life, I would..." and "Every door in the world suddenly locks, describe the aftermath."

During the summer, Wang also attended a political science conference in Aix-en-Provence, France. The paper he presented at the conference, "Anti-Corruption, Power Struggle and the Rule of Law in China," examines the current anti-corruption campaign launched by Chinese president Xi Jinping. This paper has been accepted as a chapter for an upcoming book, Corruption and Government Legitimacy: A Twentieth-First Century Perspective, to be published by Edward Elgar Publishing. He has also finished the draft for another article,“Wang Anyi’s Feminism of Difference vs. Maoist Official Feminism of Equality." In addition, he has reviewed an article for MELUS: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States. Now, he is researching and writing another article on party funding, as he has been invited to contribute to another book on this topic.  

In addition to articles in English and Chinese, Wang has written, edited or translated seven books. He has been quoted and cited in books and academic articles in Chinese as well as in English. Five of them are about literary criticism. In 2014, he edited a book, Contemporary Literary Criticism: A Leitch Reader, which was published by Peking University Press, the most prestigious academic press in China.

In 2013, Peking University Press also published another book by Dr. Wang, a translation of American Literary Criticism from 1930s to 1980s by Vincent Leitch, the leading American theorist and general editor of The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism. The original book, published by Columbia University Press, is a comprehensive, 458-page analytical account of the history of American literary criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s. Well-known American literary critic J. Hillis Miller praised it as “panoramic and all-inclusive ….. authoritative.” Stanley Fish, another leading figure of the field, endorsed it as “at once a readable and reliable guide” that is “extremely helpful.” Considered by scholars as the standard and authoritative book on the subject, it was given a Choice Award and named Outstanding Academic Book by the Association of College and Research Libraries.

The book had been translated into Hungarian, Japanese and Korean.  According to Leitch, the book is such a “monster filled with challenges” that previous attempt at translating it into Chinese had all failed. Indeed, translating it into Chinese has been a challenge that took Dr. Wang a few years. During the school year, he is busy with teaching and research, and summer vacations are spent on these difficult projects. Another challenge when translating such a theory-heavy book is that some of the terms and concepts, such as “slash fiction,” “disaggregation” or “heteroglossia,” do not exist in Chinese or are simply untranslatable. It such cases, Wang has to be very creative and expressive in the target language while remain faithful to the original, often he has to resort to notes for explanation.  

Dr. Wang’s book has caused “quite an excitement” in China. A leading Chinese scholar of comparative literature, Dr. Wang Ning says that it has “provided extremely nutritious spiritual food for Chinese readers who are interested in literary theory and criticism.” 

He was so enthusiastic that he wrote two articles that were published in ChineseSocial Science Today (CSST) and Reading, respectively, to promote the publication of Dr. Wang’s translation. In his article in CSST, he points out that Dr. Wang’s translation “will be very helpful” for Chinese scholars “to have a correct assessment of modern and contemporary American literary criticism, which will, in turn, help” them “to have a better assessment of the accomplishments by the contemporary Chinese critics.” 

Since its publication, the book has been very positively received and some professors have started to adopt it, in part or as a whole, as a textbook in Chinese college and graduate classrooms.