Lu Xun: the Meaning of the “Lantern Slide Show” Event— Revisited

( I )

Among stories told by modern writers about themselves, Lu Xun’s account of how he decided to engage in literature is perhaps one of the best known but least understood.[1] 

        This is how Rey Chow begins with her essay “’One Newsreel Helped to Change Modern Chinese History’: An Old Tale Retold.”  What the best known old tale she refers to is the ‘lantern slide show’ that Lu Xun happened to see when he was studying medicine at the Sendai Medical School in Japan during 1904-6.  It was reported that the lantern slide shown at the interlude of his microbiology lesson had a tremendous blow to the youngster.  Consequently, it had caused a great transformation upon his career from a doctor to a writer. The course of development of modern Chinese literature had thus been gravely affected. 

        However, Rey claimed that where it was ‘best known’ as a part of a famous writer’s autobiography about his writing career, it was ‘least understood’ for its significance as the discourse of technologized visuality.  It is about an experience of the power of a spectacle transmitted by the film medium.  What Lu Xun had witnessed was virtually an episode of an emerging ‘modernity’ grounded in visuality.[2]  Along this train of thought focusing on visual modernity, Rey has supposed to offer an explanation upon the deeper meaning of the event. 

        Nevertheless, over-emphasizing one particular point in argument often makes other equally significant points obscure.  Rey’s explanation of the ‘lantern slide show event’ is far from satisfactory.  It is not because she brings forth the shocking and disorienting effects of technologized visuality, but because she has exaggerated these effects to such an extent that the argument as a whole seems to be self-contradictory.

        In the first half of the paper, I shall follow Rey’s explanation and illustrate the mistake that she has committed.  In the second half, I shall draw reference to the points that Martin Heidegger has made in his ‘the Origin of the Work of Art” and Gadamer in his Truth and Method.  From their hermeneutic point of view, I think the ‘lantern slide show event’ will be better illuminated for its historical meanings in terms of personal as well as literary. 

( II )

I do not know what advanced methods are now used to teach microbiology, but at that time lantern slides were used to show the microbes; and if the lecture ended early, the instructor might show slides of natural scenery or news to fill up the time.  This was during the Russo-Japanese War, so there were many war films, and I had to join in the clapping and cheering in the lecture hall along with the other students.  It was a long time since I had seen any compatriots, but one day I saw a film showing some Chinese, one of whom was bound, while many others stood around him.  They were all strong fellows but appeared completely apathetic.  According to the commentary, the one with his hands bound was a spy working for the Russians, who was to have his head cut off by the Japanese military as a public demonstration, while the Chinese beside him had come to appreciate this spectacular event. …

Before the term was over I had left for Tokyo, because after this film I felt that medical science was not so important after all.  The people of a weak and backward country, however strong and healthy they may be, can only serve to be made materials or onlookers of such meaningless public exposure; and it doesn’t really matter how many of them die of illness.  The most important thing, therefore, was to change their spirit, and since at that time I felt that literature was the best means to this end, I determined to promote a literary movement…. I was fortunate enough to find some kindred spirits…. Our first step, of course, was to publish a magazine, the title of which denoted that this was a new birth.  As we were then classically inclined, we called it Xin Sheng [New Life].[3]

According to Rey, it is a story about the beginning of a new kind of discourse in the postcolonial “third world”, the discourse of technologized visuality, or an experience of the power of a spectacle transmitted by the film medium.  Through the process of magnification and amplification of the film medium, the power of technologized visuality is embodied as shocking and disorienting.  The analysis directs us not to the personal experience and interpretation of the scenes such as the executed victims and passive on-lookers, but to the objective milieu underscored by the relationship between visuality and power.  As a film spectator, what Lu Xun experiences is not merely the cruelty of the execution or the apathetic on-lookers.  Rey wants us to recognize the underlying power of the film medium made upon the post-colonial non-West: direct, cruel, and crude.[4] 

It is in its projectional thrust that film intensifies the shock inherent to cruelty in the form of an attack: similar to the beheading about to be experienced by the victim, the effect of the film images on Lu Xun was that of a blow.  What confront Lu Xun, through his own act of watching, are thus: first, the transparent effect of a new medium that seemingly communicates without mediation; second, the affinity between the power of this new medium and the violence of the execution itself. [5]

What Rey refers to as the visual power is the shocking effect of the technologized filmic experience.  In the case of Lu Xun, the image of a passive collective mesmerized in spectatorship of the execution projects itself on the spectator Lu Xun with the effect of shock.  The visual shock and disorientation bears for him the implication of menace.  It is an imposition of a heavy task against his own will, which constitute the “beginning” of his writing career.[6]  Rey further enlarges the menacing effects of visuality by claiming that the encounter arouses lasting concerns in the writer.  “These concerns would express themselves as a combination of two things: on the one hand, the pathetic contents or ‘materials’ of China’s backwardness, poverty, powerlessness and general apathy; on the other, the formal demand for an effective ‘language’ of communication that would enable China to catch up with the rest of the modern world.”  Thereby, “Lu Xun discovers what it means to ‘be Chinese’ in the modern world by watching film.”[7] 

( III )

        Concerning the significance of the visual encounter, for Rey, there are ambiguities.  The silent image of the slides and the definitely grave change caused upon Lu Xun open up the door of interpretation for linking up the meanings of the two ends of the story.  As the images are silent, according to Rey, “it is impossible to know for sure what the spectacle did to the observers,” and “it is equally impossible to know exactly how the spectacle of the execution as watched by the observers affected Lu Xun and his subsequent construction of the event.”  The silence-to-be-interpreted structure requires an act of nonvisual filling to make up for the lack in the visual image.[8] 

        In order to fill the interpretation gap with some kind of exactness, Rey intends to over-ride Lu Xun’s own explanation—because of the inherent deficiency of the “lack”—and replaces it with an analysis of epochal tide of technologized visuality.  Lu Xun’s visual encounter is drawn as an example “inscribed in the events of modernity and national strengthening for a ‘third world’ culture.”[9]  The blow made upon Lu Xun manifests itself as an instance of the menacing effects of technologized visuality forcing upon the third world.  With regard to the arrival of visual modernity, Lu Xun himself becomes a totally “passive” witness.  Rey has noted the “aggressivity” of the film medium which “signifies the immediacy and efficacy of a form of communication that is beyond words as well as the linearity of verbal writing.”[10]  His discovery of what it means to “be Chinese” in the modern world is a sheer instance that testifies to the shocking and disorienting effects of the film medium. 

        While Rey tends to emphasize the objective aggressivity of the technologized visual medium that haunts Lu Xun, she just cannot shy away from the active agency of Lu Xun’s and his leading revolutionary contribution to the written literature.  Following Rey’s logic, the most likely consequence of the haunting effect upon Lu Xun will be that either Lu Xun will align himself with the powerful medium or else he will—given the revolutionary and revolting character of Lu Xun— make a revolt against the aggressivity.  Yet, in actuality, he takes neither stance.  Lu Xun’s own consequential reaction seems to have little to do with Rey’s analysis of the film medium.  Even Rey herself has noted this when she claims that “when intellectuals are about to lose their traditional hold on culture through their mastery of the written word, revealingly, Lu Xun’s response is not an explicit rejection of the visual but a return to literature.”[11]  Obviously, his decision of conversion from specialization in medicine to literature is not made with regard to the repressing tide of techonologized visuality which Rey tries to emphasize. Her analysis focusing on the seemingly aggressive visual medium and the supposingly subservient status of Lu Xun as an audience is not compatible with the active agency of Lu Xun in literature hereafter. 

        After noting the logical gap, Rey tries to explain it away in another way.  She quotes Matin Jay’s essay “The Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” which writes: “We confront again and again the ubiquity of vision as the master sense of the modern era.”  Such scopic regime has created “a distance between oneself and the world, and thus to constitute it as something picture-like—as an object of exhibit.”[12]  In this way, it establishes seeing as a form of power and being seen as a form of powerlessness.  The hegemony of the European “gaze” exemplified by film underlies the division between seer and seen, active eyes and passive spectacle.[13]  It is this line of thought that Rey solicits to explain the cause of Lu Xun’s great conversion.  She seems to suggest that this way of explanation is more certain and exact than relying on Lu Xun’s own interpretation upon the “silent” film. 

In the meantime, she complains that the Western literature critics have unnoticingly overwhelmed the dominance of Western gaze upon the East.  It is virtually an superimposition.  So in the case of Lu Xun, what she has discovered is “the contempt for visuality”: a repudiation of visual objects as examples of mere subjugation and passivity.

If modern self-consciousness in China as well as elsewhere in the “third world” cannot be severed from ethnicity and a sense of collective victimization, the “solution” of the literary turn that Lu Xun adopts is, as already noted, a continual privileging of the age-old signification of words.  …in Lu Xun’s response to his shock at being forced to sit and watch the slide show, the image is regarded as a graphic record of violence in such a way as to associate being-seen with passivity; whereas the written word is reinvested with the meaning of an active agent that can mobilize cultural transformation.[14]

Here Rey seems to start noticing the deficiency of analysis of “technologized visuality” when it is drawn against Lu Xun’s own active agency in reaction.  While espousing the theory to explain the shocking and disorienting effects upon Lu Xun at the beginning of the essay, now she turns up to be a critic of the theory.  Hereby she carries her criticism further.

If the image is linked with victimization, the written word is imagined to be a form of empowerment.  Besides the radical conversion from medicine to literature, therefore, the other conversion in Lu Xun’s story is a reconversion to tradition, a reaffirmation of culture as literary culture, which is to be centered in writing and reading, in opposition to the technology that includes film as well as medicine. [15]

Now it becomes doubtful how far Lu Xun’s conversion was due to the visual hegemony that the West imposed on the non-West.  Or rather than that, it was Lu Xun’s own historical sensitivity—through the coincidental visual encounter that triggered the grave change as a whole.  A talented Chinese youngster in his early twenty, at the beginning of twentieth century, studied medicine in Japan, who had high hopes to get involved in the urgent task of national reform in motherland upon graduation.  Such a youth coming out from traditional big family background, being put on the volition track of learning Western knowledge as a means of national self-strengthening, already reflects in himself an epochal characteristics of last century China.  Lu Xun might not fully realize the historical significance he was borne with at the time he put his steps towards Japan.  But, sooner or later, once Lu Xun’s nerve was touched on by historically revealing information, whether it was delivered by technologized filmic medium or other printed media, the dramatic change would be about to be initiated.  It was the contents of the filmic image—historically relevant and revealing to an anxious youngster who came from a country on the verge of being totally colonized—that gave Lu Xun the fundamental blow.  The haunting effects originate from the filmic messages rather than the visual medium.  The argumentative dilemma in which Rey has been caught now becomes transparent.  At the beginning of this paper, I quote Rey’s remark: “Among stories told by modern writers about themselves, Lu Xun’s account of how he decided to engage in literature is perhaps one of the best known but least understood.”[16]  Where Rey intends to make Lu Xun’s engagement in literature better understood, she has actually obscured the fundamental meaning of the event.

( IV )

        In fact, concerning Lu Xun’s conversion, Heidegger’s approach exemplified in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” sounds more appropriate.  Rey ever cites it in her essay, particularly mentioning that Heidegger compares the effect of a work of art on the observer to a thrust or a blow, which can cause “disorientation” on the observer.  She asserts that the surprise, shock and oscillation described by Heidegger were no doubt experienced by Lu Xun.  But this disorientation is not only about the meaning of art and creativity.  She eventually attributes such disorientation to the process of magnification and amplification that is made possible by the film medium. [17]  However, it is totally questionable whether this is the way of art that Heidegger considers what art work means.  Or maybe she simply puts her own words in the mouth of Heidegger.  Now let’s turn to Heidegger to see how he says in his renowned essay.

        Before digging into the origin of the work of art, Heidegger first identifies the “thingly” quality of artworks in order to dismiss this line of thought as though “art” is something premised upon the “thingly” quality of artworks.  He draws upon ancient ontologies for three traditional interpretations of “thing” and finds that they originate from a particular kind of human activity or involvement with tools or equipments.  Such an equipmental origin of  the interpretation of “thing” has distorted the fundamental character of “thing” and “artwork”. 

The preconception shackles reflection on the Being of any given being.  Thus it comes about that prevailing thing-concepts obstruct the way toward the thingly character of the thing as well as toward the equipmental character of equipment, and all the more toward the workly character of the work.[18]

One version of them has it that the “thing” is interpreted as a substance to which properties belong; or as a subject that certain predicates belong.[19]  In the case of artwork analysis, such approach will seek to fix the “thingly” nature of the work and then examine the functional predicates it contains as a piece of art.  Rey’s analysis of technologized visuality on the case of Lu Xun has just committed the mistake that Heidegger wants to dismiss.  Her analysis bases on the thingly character of the film medium and then investigates the functional influence that it exerts on the third world non-West.  Therefore, she has obstructed the way to “better understanding” the workly character of the slide show. 

        Heidegger claims that, “what is at work in the work: the disclosure of the particular being in its Being, the happening of truth.”[20]  Now we are not interested in the thingly character of a work, but the happening of truth—a disclosure of what and how the artwork is—the being in its Being.  Thereby the work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force.  Here Heidegger reminds us again against the tendency to take a thingly view of what he means by world.

The world is not the mere collection of the countable or uncountable, familiar and unfamiliar things at hand.  The world worlds, and is more fully in being than the tangible and perceptible realm… World is never an object that stands before us and can be seen. [21]

World, in Heideggerian sense, refers to contextual involvement of meaning that one lives out.  In such sense, objects are no bare objects thrown in front of us.  They are constituents of the meaningful context we are always already getting involved.  It is a familiar horizon that we experience within significant relationships with things, tools and other human beings.  Heidegger calls such structural whole of meaningful context that we are thrown upon as being-in-the-world.[22]  Therefore, every existent that we experience is itself significant to us in this way or another.  Following this line of thought, Heidegger claims that the work as work sets up a world.  The world holds open the open region of the world.[23]  But what does it mean that the world set up by a work holds open the open region of the world?  If we go back to the Heideggerian sense of “world” as meaningful context of significant relationships that we experience, we shall find that such meaningful context is never a closed system. 

World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being.  Wherever those utterly essential decisions of our history are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds. [24]

Being-in-the-world, we live out of the meaningful context.  “We” and “world” are not separate entities.  We are being-in-the-world.  In that kind of worldly involvement, we experience livingly in the sense that “the world worlds.”  In Being and Time, Heidegger’s analysis of world evolves around Dasein, the ways that we exist.  In “The Origin of the Work of Art,” the analysis of world evolves around “the work”.  Just as there is disclosure of Being in Dasein (the ways we are), there also occurs in the work of a disclosure of a particular being—disclosing what and how it is.  “The world worlds” in the sense that there is a disclosure of Being.  Work itself is bound up with certain meaningful context of involvement and such context itself is not fixed.  “The work opens up a world and keeps it abidingly in force.” [25]  It is laid open.  Such open horizon of meaningful context keeps disclosing itself.  Heidegger calls such occurring a happening of truth. 

( V )

Hermeneutics is an essential topic in Being and Time but Heidegger has slipped away from it in his discussion of artwork.  In fact, without the concept of hermeneutics, the discussion of artwork will become difficult.

        In expositing the existentiality of Dasein in Being and Time, Heidegger underscore “understanding” as an important mode of being which reveals itself as temporality.  We are thrown to certain historical background, brought up in certain social-cultural contexts, grow up in certain family and to be caught in relations with contemporaries.  In a word, we are caught in meaningful contexts of involvement and live out our lives from it.  These contextual involvements, or the world, are always already there in which and by which we make sense of what we are doing.  The world is not a static state of existents but an ever-unfolding of meanings and understanding involvements as we live on.  

World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being.  Wherever those utterly essential decisions of our history are made, are taken up and abandoned by us, go unrecognized and are rediscovered by new inquiry, there the world worlds. [26]

Being bound up with the meaningful contexts, we live and act interpretively—disclosing the contexts in this way or that way.  Sense-making is the “how” we exist.  As we track down the path from birth to death, these meaningful contexts extends and discloses historically.  In Heideggerian terms, the world worlds.  Thus, underlying this kind of contexts are the hermeneutic experience of life.  It consists in the historicality of human existence.  As the world worlds, we exist historically.

        Though the concept of hermeneutics is not mentioned in Heidegger’s investigation of the being of artwork, it is implied when he keeps to the concept of “world” and verbalizes it.  The phenomenological treatment of artwork has it that artwork itself is also bound up with world—meaningful contexts of involvement, which makes disclosure of meanings possible.  Truth is maintained in the disclosure.  Art is then a becoming and happening of truth.  The essence of art is the setting-itself-into-work of truth, the bringing of work-being into movement and happening.[27]  It is a hermeneutic phenomenon that the world worlds in the being of artwork.  It worlds as a happening of truth and it happens historically.  In this dimension, he refers art as historical.  History here does not mean a sequence of events in time.

This means not simply that art has a history in the extrinsic sense that in the course of time it, too, appears along with many other things, and in the process changes and passes away and offers changing aspects for historiology.  Art is history in the essential sense that it grounds history.[28]

Where the world artwork sets up, it worlds and worlds historically.  And “as historical it is the creative preserving of truth in the work.”  Only in this way, art obtains its essential origin. 

        Gadamer, as a student of Heidegger as well as an important exponent of his philosophy, who has put Heideggerian concepts into more understandable terms.  The problematic discussed in “The Origin of the Work of Art” is continued in the Part I of Truth and Method, in which Gadamer deals with “The question of truth as it emerges in the experience of art.”  After reviewing the connections between the humanist tradition and Kant’s doctrine of aesthetics, Gadamer arrives at the discussion of “The ontology of the work of art and its hermeneutic significance.”[29]  In this connection, Gadamer draws upon the tragic as an example. 

The spectator (of the tragic)… participates in the communion of being present.  The real emphasis of the tragic phenomenon lies ultimately on what is presented and recognized. … the elevation and strong emotion that seize the spectator in fact deepen his continuity with himself. …He finds himself in the tragic action because what he encounters is his own history, familiar to him from religious or historical tradition; … This effect presumes not only that the spectator is still familiar with the story, but also that its language still really reaches him.  Only then can the spectator’s encounter with the tragic theme and tragic work become a self-encounter. …There remains a continuity of meaning which links the work of art with the existing world. [30] 

Gadamer’s exposition, in fact, enlivens those obscure Heideggerian terms.  The tragic, as an artwork, does not stand extrinsically before the spectators.  Instead, it is bound up with its world.  The world worlds as “the spectator participates in the communion of being present.”  The meaningful contexts take effect when “he finds himself in the tragic action because what he encounters is his own history, familiar to him from religious or historical tradition.”   There is a happening of truth, “a continuity of meaning which links the work of art with the existing world.”  In such occurring, it involves hermeneutic experience which unfolds  historically.  Hence in such occurring, one encounters one’s historical self.  In this regard, Gadamer refers to the specific temporality of aesthetic being—which has its being in the process of being presented—comes to exist in reproduction as a distinct, independent phenomenon.[31] 

( VI )

        Now, let’s come back to the nature of Lu Xun’s visual encounter.  Rey tries to argue that, given the silent nature of the slide show, the actual significance of Lu Xun’s visual experience may be clouded by his own subjective explanation.  For Rey, Lu Xun’s grave transformation can only be substantially accounted by returning the event back to its historical background through the analysis of the technologized visual hegemony that the West imposed on the colonized third world.  Yet, in the fore-going sections, I have already reviewed the internal inconsistency of Rey’s argument: while intending to emphasize the unilateral menacing effect of visual hegemony on the one hand, she fails to account the active agency of Lu Xun’s reaction and the paramount influence he has effected on written literature and his age.  The point is that Rey fails to catch at the hermeneutic nature of the artistic experience. 

        Concerning the visual encounter, as a spectator, Lu Xun does not hold himself aloof at the distance enjoying the visual art with which something is presented.  In fact, he “participated in the communion of being present.”  The slide show, as an artwork, sets up a world which is historically sensitive and significant.  It is

…a film showing some Chinese, one of whom was bound, while many others stood around him.  They were all strong fellows but appeared completely apathetic.  According to the commentary, the one with his hands bound was a spy working for the Russians, who was to have his head cut off by the Japanese military as a public demonstration, while the Chinese beside him had come to appreciate this spectacular event. [32]

The slides, showing the military aggressiveness of Japanese who engaged in the cruelty of execution that involved Russians and apathetic Chinese, were shown at the time of Russio-Japanese War.  Nobody could under-estimate the thickness of the content and its contextual involvement with the historical time that it was shown.  What is more, it involved the spectatorship of a shrew elite youngster who was going to engage in the modernization of his motherland upon graduation.  He was such a youth who had just come out from traditional big family background— bearing a grudge against the traditional values while putting himself on the volition track of national self-strengthening by learning Western knowledge.  Lu Xun’s agency already reflects in himself an epochal characteristics of last century China.  Lu Xun might not fully realize the historical significance he was borne with at the time he put his steps towards Japan.  But, sooner or later, once Lu Xun’s nerve was touched on by historically revealing information, whether it was delivered by technologized filmic medium or other printed media, an explosive change would be initiated. 

        So, in Heideggerian terms, the world worlds upon the visual encounter.  The world of the work worlds as a structural whole of the content of the slides, the background of Lu Xun and the historical time of the show.  According to Heidegger, it is a happening of truth.  In such happening, we do not take the artwork and the spectator as the two poles of existents and thereby making the spectator as a passive object to be influenced by the slide show.  Though as a spectator, Lu Xun in fact “participates in the communion of being present.” [33] As long as the world worlds, the meaningful contexts of involvements—transcending the bipolar split of the influence and the being-influenced—speak out itself. The meaningful contexts take effect when Lu Xun “finds himself in the event exhibited because what he encounters is his own history, familiar to him from his historical tradition.”  As long as there is “a continuity of meaning which links the work of art with the existing world,” there is a happening of truth.

(VII)

        Rey is correct for the wrong reason to comment that “Lu Xun discovers what it means to ‘be Chinese’ in the modern world by watching film.”

Because it is grounded in an apprehension of the aggressiveness of the technological medium of visuality, self-consciousness henceforth could not be separated from a certain violence that splits the self, in the very moment it becomes “conscious,” into seeing and the seen.  “Being Chinese” would be henceforth carry in it the imagistic memory—the memorable image—of this violence.

Our fore-going discussion has revealed how Rey’s analysis of the event has been misguided.  We do not see any self-split in Lu Xun’s self-recognition after watching the film.  In fact, Lu Xun’s transformation is fully understandable if we follow the line of   Lu Xun’s own interpretation. It is a coherent manifestation of a-historical-event-cum-personal-hermeneutic-experieenc which co-activates the meaningful contexts of the age, of certain social-cultural milieu and of a certain peculiar youngster of his own history.  The emerged self-consciousness of Lu Xun itself just testifies to what Heidegger means by “the happening of truth,” or what Gadamer means by “a continuity of meaning which links the work of art with the existing world,” as well as with the spectator’s self.  “Self” is not a formed entity once and for all.  Self, being bound up with world, is always in the making historically.  Self arises out of the hermeneutic experience—itself ever-extending coherently.  Admittedly, the historicality of visual modernity can be a constitutive part of the worlding structural whole of the hermeneutic experience.  Yet it is a constitutive part so long as it is a constitutive part of the historically meaningful contexts that the visual encounter manifests.  Nevertheless, over-emphasizing it as a unilateral influence upon the influenced-spectator will just cast its actual significance into obscurity rather than making it better understood.

        Jiang Li-jun, in the essay of “The Politics of Time”, has discussed the contrast between the perspectives of historicism and after-history.  The former upholds a linear conception of history, intending to ascertain a certain historical event of its historical time as a means to depict an once and for all picture of reality.  The latter intends to lay open the horizon of “the past” so that each ever-changing moment of history-writing allows “the picture of the past” the possibility to be revised and renewed persistently.  Lu Xun, in reiterating the event of “the lantern slide show event”, operates as what “after-history” entails.  It admits lasting variations in terms of meaning and significance each time the event is memorized and re-told.  Scholars may participate in the “after-history” by re-telling the event and by interpreting Lu Xun’s re-telling.[34]

        Jiang’s illumination of after-history accords well with Heidegger-Gadamer’s perspective on the hermeneutic nature of human existence and the origin of artwork.  As human beings are historical existents, we are thrown into this or that meaningful context of involvements which is historically significant.  The context is always already there activating in each experiential encounter in such manner that understanding and interpretation become the way we exist.  We are being-in-the-world.  The world worlds in the encounter that Lu Xun watched the film.  It worlds in the encounter that Lu Xun re-told the story and it worlds when the whole story is re-told.  In each case, the world worlds and worlds differently.  If we pay closer attention to the hermeneutic situation of our existence, we shall be able to better “understand” the meanings of art, history and ourselves.

Bibliography

Rey Chow, “’One Newsreel Helped to Change Modern Chinese History’: An Old Tale Retold” in Primitive Passions: Visuality, Sexuality, Ethnography and Contemporary Chinese Cinema (NY: Columbia UP, 1995).  

Martin Jay, “Scopic Regimes of Modernity,” in Vision and Visuality, edited by Hal Foster (Seattle, Wash: Bay Press, 1988).

Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings from Being and Time to the Task of Thinking, edited by David Farrell Krell (London : Routledge, 1993).

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall, 2nd ed. (New York : Continuum, 1994).

羅崗，顧錚主编，《視覺文化讀本》，桂林：廣西師範大學出版社，2003。