Transforming Sensibilities: The Politics of Rewriting in Shi Zhecun’s “Shi Xiu”

abstract: During the 1920s and 1930s, colonized Shanghai offered a vibrant setting for the development of new aesthetic forms. Focusing on Shi Zhecun’s (1905–2003) “Shi Xiu,” a rewrite of a famous episode of the Ming novel Water Margin , this article rethinks the politics of rewriting within the Shanghai modernist landscape and shows that the rewrite, as a form of intertextuality that registers the encounter of a wide array of local and foreign sources, objectifies the historically stratified nature of the character’s “sensibility.” Himei Kadeo’s conceptualization of “sensibility” as a historically determined faculty is evoked here to illuminate the rewrite’s effort to historicize the character’s bodily senses and the historical and ethical implications of such an effort. The analysis is structured around the concepts of “erotic,” “grotesque,” and “ironic nonsense,” as theorized by Miriam Silverberg in her study of 1920s and 1930s Japanese mass culture, to tease out, beyond cross-cultural influences, the contribution that a distinctly modernist aesthetics can make to the pursuit of a political, social, and ethical agenda.