Reading Lu Xun Through Carl Jung By Carolyn Brown

in general it avoids consideration of how something arrived in the text in favor of a description of the text itself. Similarly, it largely avoids discussion of the effect that the text produces in the reader.³⁷ Reader-response criticism is a distinct line of investigation of its own. Most significantly, this study treats the stories as a unity, looking at what is similar across the corpus, rather than the more usual way of interrogating them as evidence of the developmental progression of Lu Xun’s thinking over this period, which is a natural outcome of viewing these works primarily in biographical and historical contexts.

The conclusion, “Inner Mastery, Prophetic Voice,” departs from the methodology of textual analysis found in the four core chapters to speculate on the psychological motivations for Lu Xun’s eight-year burst of creativity. The epilogue ventures a bit of personal reader-response criticism as I propose an answer to my own question, posed in the prologue, as to why these stories have been so important to me.

It should now be apparent that my work runs counter to the overall trend of broadening the context in which the stories are viewed. Rather than a telescope, I have deployed a microscope, in the hopes that greater attention to small details will enable new ways of seeing the larger picture, in some cases the relevant connections with the Chinese tradition as well as Western currents. Zhang Longxi has argued in another context that the measure of a successful critical approach is whether what it produces is “interesting, useful, and productive.”³⁸ By coming around from a direction not grounded solely in a particular social context, this approach adds one more tool to the toolbox of literary approaches to Lu Xun’s stories and opens an additional path towards entering Lu Xun’s stories into the international canon of major twentieth century writers.