Sheldon H Lu
Biographic Data
| ID | 1245284 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Sheldon H Lu |
| GIVEN NAMES | Sheldon H |
| FAMILY NAME | Lu |
| SIGNATURE | LU S H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Davis |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7336-1649 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 31 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 23 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1996 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Translation of Tao Qian’s poetry as inspiration for literary theory, sinology, and comparative literature
This essay explores the English translation and discussion of Tao Qian’s 陶潜(陶渊明, circa 365–427) Chinese poetry by various translators and literary critics in the West. Arthur Waley, William Empson, Jonathan Culler, James Hightower, Eugene Eoyang, and others have resorted to Tao’s one particular poem “Change of Seasons” 时运 to advance their ideas about literary theory, comparative literature, and Sinology. An old Chinese poem has gained new life in…
Cinematic Guerrillas
The Early Modern Period, Dream of the Red Chamber, and World Literature
This essay lies at the intersection of several fields: the study of the novel, world literature, early modern studies, and global modernity. It analyzes the representation of the outside world in the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber (aka The Story of the Stone ) from the 18th century. There exist frequent appearances of foreign objects as well as glimpses of China’s trade with the West in the novel, and yet the literary work maintains a Chi…
Chinese-Language Film
Introduction
The theme of this special issue of Telos is the modern city in world cinema. Its various essays examine the depiction of cities and their constitutive contexts through the lens of critical theory, political theory, cultural theory, and film theory. The contributors tackle a range of topics: the experience of modernity in urban contexts; cities in relation to civil society and the public sphere; the metropolis and cosmopolitanism; the urban/rural …
Citing China
Citing China explores the role film plays in creating a common ground for the exchange of political and aesthetic ideas between China and the rest of the world. It does so by examining the depiction of China in contemporary film, looking at how global filmmakers “cite” China on screen. Author Gina Marchetti’s aim is not to point to how China continues to function as a metaphor or allusion that has little to do with the geopolitical actualities of…
Commentary
This commentary begins with a review of the status and development of the burgeoning field of environmental humanities, of which ecocriticism (literature and environment studies) is an important subfield. The authors call for more attention to environmental humanities on a global scale, beyond the confines of Western academia. The second part of the commentary discusses the individual essays collected in this special issue of Comparative Literatu…
Introduction
This article is a short introduction to the genealogy, theory and practice of Chinese ecocinema. It situates Chinese ecocinema in the broad context of a general ecological and environmental turn in contemporary humanistic and cultural studies. The article pays close attention to contemporary Chinese-language documentaries that embrace an ecological consciousness. Furthermore, the article zeroes in on a specific Taiwanese documentary: My Fancy Hig…
Transnational Chinese Cinemas
Zhang Yimou's first film, Red Sorghum, took the Golden Bear Award in 1988 at the Berlin International Film Festival. Since then Chinese films have continued to arrest worldwide attention and capture major film awards, winning an international following that continues to grow. Transnational Chinese Cinemas spans nearly the entire length of twentieth-century Chinese film history. The volume traces the evolution of Chinese national cinema, and demon…
DV-Made China
In 1990s post-Reform China, a growing number of people armed with video cameras poured out upon the Chinese landscape to both observe and contribute to the social changes then underway. Happening upon the crucial platform of an older independent film movement, this digital turn has given us a "DV China" that includes film and media communities across different social strata and disenfranchised groups, including ethnic and religious minorities and…
Cosmopolitanism and Alternative Modernity in Twentieth-Century China
My essay joins the revisionist project of rewriting modern Chinese intellectual history. The historiography of modern China usually foregrounds the theme of nationalism in the grand narrative of China's arduous struggles for liberation, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. Radical breaks from the Chinese tradition or from the outside world have occurred in the form of a series of earth-shaking revolutions throughout the twenti…
Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas
Although cinema has been transnational since its inception, contemporary Sino-French film exemplifies the cinematic hybridity of the contemporary age of globalization. The Sino-French comprises crossover between the Sinophone and the Francophone. However, Taiwanese and mainland helmed films since 2000 provide the focus here and connect with metropolitan France and more specifically Paris, not the broader French speaking world. Contemporary Sino-F…
DV-Made China
Fragrant Orchid
Re-visioning Global Modernity through the Prism of China
This essay reviews and assesses recent attempts to revisit and revise the position of China in the configuration of global modernity. Such re-descriptions question the implicit Eurocentric teleology of modern world history. First, the discourse of East Asian modernity or Confucian capitalism draws on late imperial (early modern) East Asia to locate an alternative origin of global modernity. Second, recent scholarship in world-systems analysis rep…
Artistic interventions in contemporary China
This concluding article examines the ways in which Chinese artists depict, decipher, and react to urbanization in contemporary China. It summarizes several important themes in the cluster of articles included in this special issue of China Information. First, Chinese artists navigate the complex relationship between art and society, namely the tension between the individual aspirations of artists on the one hand and the limits of tolerance in Chi…
Beyond Sinology
Book Review| September 01 2014 Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture. By Bachner, Andrea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 282 p. Sheldon Lu Sheldon Lu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2014) 66 (3): 371–373. https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-2773720 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn M…
From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda
Throughout the twentieth century, American filmmakers have embraced cinematic representations of China. Beginning with D.W. Griffith’s silent classic Broken Blossoms (1919) and ending with the computer-animated Kung Fu Panda (2008), this book explores China’s changing role in the American imagination as seen in American films. It analyzes a series of influential films that suggest the welter of intense and conflicting impulses that have surrounde…
From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda
Throughout the twentieth century, American filmmakers have embraced cinematic representations of China. Beginning with D.W. Griffith's silent classic "Broken Blossoms" (1919) and ending with the computer-animated "Kung Fu Panda" (2008), this book explores China's changing role in the American imagination. Taking viewers into zones that frequently resist logical expression or more orthodox historical investigation, the films suggest the welter of …
I Ching and the origin of the Chinese semiotic tradition
This article explores the semiotic thought of I Ching (Book of Changes). This Confucian canon and the subsequent commentaries on it constitute the origin and one of the most important legacies of traditional Chinese theories of the sign. A central notion of I Ching is xiang — variously translated as ‘sign,’ or ‘image.’ The author approaches the idea of the ‘sign’ in I Ching and the later exegetical tradition in four aspects: 1) definition of the …
Urban Generation
History, Memory, Nostalgia
This study will focus on a cluster of new films and television dramas that revisit and rewrite the history of Chinese socialism from a different point of view in light of the capitalist frenzy of commercialism and commodification in contemporary post-socialist China. It seems that it is only possible after some 20 years, after the historical wounds and traumas have been largely healed, that a new critical distance can be reached in regard to the …
Beautiful Violence
Commentary| August 01 2004 Beautiful Violence: War, Peace, Globalization Sheldon Lu Sheldon Lu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2004) 12 (3): 759–771. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-12-3-759 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sheldon Lu; Beautiful Violence: War, Peace, Globalization. positions 1 August 2004; 12 (3): 759–771. doi: https://doi.org/…
Soap Opera in China
This essay examines Chinese television drama in the 1990s. It focuses on soap operas involving transnational romances between Chinese men and Russian and American women. The construction of Chinese masculinity through the foreign woman has become a new way of imagining national identity in the age of globalization
Global Post Modernization
Soap Opera in China
This essay examines Chinese television drama in the 1990s. It focuses on soap operas involving transnational romances between Chinese men and Russian and American women. The construction of Chinese masculinity through the foreign woman has become a new way of imagining national identity in the age of globalization
Artistic interventions in contemporary China
This concluding article examines the ways in which Chinese artists depict, decipher, and react to urbanization in contemporary China. It summarizes several important themes in the cluster of articles included in this special issue of China Information. First, Chinese artists navigate the complex relationship between art and society, namely the tension between the individual aspirations of artists on the one hand and the limits of tolerance in Chi…
Cosmopolitanism and Alternative Modernity in Twentieth-Century China
My essay joins the revisionist project of rewriting modern Chinese intellectual history. The historiography of modern China usually foregrounds the theme of nationalism in the grand narrative of China's arduous struggles for liberation, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. Radical breaks from the Chinese tradition or from the outside world have occurred in the form of a series of earth-shaking revolutions throughout the twenti…
From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda
Throughout the twentieth century, American filmmakers have embraced cinematic representations of China. Beginning with D.W. Griffith's silent classic "Broken Blossoms" (1919) and ending with the computer-animated "Kung Fu Panda" (2008), this book explores China's changing role in the American imagination. Taking viewers into zones that frequently resist logical expression or more orthodox historical investigation, the films suggest the welter of …
Beautiful Violence
Commentary| August 01 2004 Beautiful Violence: War, Peace, Globalization Sheldon Lu Sheldon Lu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2004) 12 (3): 759–771. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-12-3-759 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sheldon Lu; Beautiful Violence: War, Peace, Globalization. positions 1 August 2004; 12 (3): 759–771. doi: https://doi.org/…
Global Post Modernization
Postmodernity, Popular Culture, and the Intellectual
Stop arguing. Liu Shunming clapped his hands and yelled. Let's play a game next, OK? The rule of this game is really simple. Everyone says a line to Yuanbao, but you mustn't say what's already said by others. You are only allowed to say your own words. The boys were silent for a while. Then, each opened his mouth. Angry youth. Lost generation. Structur... structur .. structural realism. Postmodernism
Global Post Modernization
Soap Opera in China
This essay examines Chinese television drama in the 1990s. It focuses on soap operas involving transnational romances between Chinese men and Russian and American women. The construction of Chinese masculinity through the foreign woman has become a new way of imagining national identity in the age of globalization
Beautiful Violence
Commentary| August 01 2004 Beautiful Violence: War, Peace, Globalization Sheldon Lu Sheldon Lu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google positions (2004) 12 (3): 759–771. https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-12-3-759 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Sheldon Lu; Beautiful Violence: War, Peace, Globalization. positions 1 August 2004; 12 (3): 759–771. doi: https://doi.org/…
History, Memory, Nostalgia
This study will focus on a cluster of new films and television dramas that revisit and rewrite the history of Chinese socialism from a different point of view in light of the capitalist frenzy of commercialism and commodification in contemporary post-socialist China. It seems that it is only possible after some 20 years, after the historical wounds and traumas have been largely healed, that a new critical distance can be reached in regard to the …
Urban Generation
I Ching and the origin of the Chinese semiotic tradition
This article explores the semiotic thought of I Ching (Book of Changes). This Confucian canon and the subsequent commentaries on it constitute the origin and one of the most important legacies of traditional Chinese theories of the sign. A central notion of I Ching is xiang — variously translated as ‘sign,’ or ‘image.’ The author approaches the idea of the ‘sign’ in I Ching and the later exegetical tradition in four aspects: 1) definition of the …
Beyond Sinology
Book Review| September 01 2014 Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture Beyond Sinology: Chinese Writing and the Scripts of Culture. By Bachner, Andrea. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. 282 p. Sheldon Lu Sheldon Lu Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature (2014) 66 (3): 371–373. https://doi.org/10.1215/00104124-2773720 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn M…
From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda
Throughout the twentieth century, American filmmakers have embraced cinematic representations of China. Beginning with D.W. Griffith’s silent classic Broken Blossoms (1919) and ending with the computer-animated Kung Fu Panda (2008), this book explores China’s changing role in the American imagination as seen in American films. It analyzes a series of influential films that suggest the welter of intense and conflicting impulses that have surrounde…
From Fu Manchu to Kung Fu Panda
Throughout the twentieth century, American filmmakers have embraced cinematic representations of China. Beginning with D.W. Griffith's silent classic "Broken Blossoms" (1919) and ending with the computer-animated "Kung Fu Panda" (2008), this book explores China's changing role in the American imagination. Taking viewers into zones that frequently resist logical expression or more orthodox historical investigation, the films suggest the welter of …
DV-Made China
Fragrant Orchid
Re-visioning Global Modernity through the Prism of China
This essay reviews and assesses recent attempts to revisit and revise the position of China in the configuration of global modernity. Such re-descriptions question the implicit Eurocentric teleology of modern world history. First, the discourse of East Asian modernity or Confucian capitalism draws on late imperial (early modern) East Asia to locate an alternative origin of global modernity. Second, recent scholarship in world-systems analysis rep…
Artistic interventions in contemporary China
This concluding article examines the ways in which Chinese artists depict, decipher, and react to urbanization in contemporary China. It summarizes several important themes in the cluster of articles included in this special issue of China Information. First, Chinese artists navigate the complex relationship between art and society, namely the tension between the individual aspirations of artists on the one hand and the limits of tolerance in Chi…
Contemporary Sino-French Cinemas
Although cinema has been transnational since its inception, contemporary Sino-French film exemplifies the cinematic hybridity of the contemporary age of globalization. The Sino-French comprises crossover between the Sinophone and the Francophone. However, Taiwanese and mainland helmed films since 2000 provide the focus here and connect with metropolitan France and more specifically Paris, not the broader French speaking world. Contemporary Sino-F…
Introduction
This article is a short introduction to the genealogy, theory and practice of Chinese ecocinema. It situates Chinese ecocinema in the broad context of a general ecological and environmental turn in contemporary humanistic and cultural studies. The article pays close attention to contemporary Chinese-language documentaries that embrace an ecological consciousness. Furthermore, the article zeroes in on a specific Taiwanese documentary: My Fancy Hig…
Transnational Chinese Cinemas
Zhang Yimou's first film, Red Sorghum, took the Golden Bear Award in 1988 at the Berlin International Film Festival. Since then Chinese films have continued to arrest worldwide attention and capture major film awards, winning an international following that continues to grow. Transnational Chinese Cinemas spans nearly the entire length of twentieth-century Chinese film history. The volume traces the evolution of Chinese national cinema, and demon…
DV-Made China
In 1990s post-Reform China, a growing number of people armed with video cameras poured out upon the Chinese landscape to both observe and contribute to the social changes then underway. Happening upon the crucial platform of an older independent film movement, this digital turn has given us a "DV China" that includes film and media communities across different social strata and disenfranchised groups, including ethnic and religious minorities and…
Cosmopolitanism and Alternative Modernity in Twentieth-Century China
My essay joins the revisionist project of rewriting modern Chinese intellectual history. The historiography of modern China usually foregrounds the theme of nationalism in the grand narrative of China's arduous struggles for liberation, anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, and anti-capitalism. Radical breaks from the Chinese tradition or from the outside world have occurred in the form of a series of earth-shaking revolutions throughout the twenti…
Commentary
This commentary begins with a review of the status and development of the burgeoning field of environmental humanities, of which ecocriticism (literature and environment studies) is an important subfield. The authors call for more attention to environmental humanities on a global scale, beyond the confines of Western academia. The second part of the commentary discusses the individual essays collected in this special issue of Comparative Literatu…
Citing China
Citing China explores the role film plays in creating a common ground for the exchange of political and aesthetic ideas between China and the rest of the world. It does so by examining the depiction of China in contemporary film, looking at how global filmmakers “cite” China on screen. Author Gina Marchetti’s aim is not to point to how China continues to function as a metaphor or allusion that has little to do with the geopolitical actualities of…
Introduction
The theme of this special issue of Telos is the modern city in world cinema. Its various essays examine the depiction of cities and their constitutive contexts through the lens of critical theory, political theory, cultural theory, and film theory. The contributors tackle a range of topics: the experience of modernity in urban contexts; cities in relation to civil society and the public sphere; the metropolis and cosmopolitanism; the urban/rural …
Chinese-Language Film
The Early Modern Period, Dream of the Red Chamber, and World Literature
This essay lies at the intersection of several fields: the study of the novel, world literature, early modern studies, and global modernity. It analyzes the representation of the outside world in the Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber (aka The Story of the Stone ) from the 18th century. There exist frequent appearances of foreign objects as well as glimpses of China’s trade with the West in the novel, and yet the literary work maintains a Chi…
Cinematic Guerrillas
China (17 works) · Art (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Aesthetics (11 works) · Chinese history and philosophy (11 works) · History (11 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Law (8 works) · Literature (8 works)