Spring River Flows East

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Among this week’s readings, William’s chapter and Sutcliffe’s paper can be seen mutually supplementary that while the former lays the ground of analyzing typical representational and narrative strategies in American melodrama as a genre, which can be taken as an archetype interpretation to consider A Spring River Flows East, in the latter one, Sutcliffe reminds us the residual patriarchal and sexist stereotypes from Chinese pre-modern culture still remain strong in modern discourse in the cultural transformation in early 20th century, thus largely molding the gender roles in the film. This dialogue is relevant to last week’s issue of vernacular modernism and gender. In the case of A Spring River Flows East, I think that most scholars will not deny the opinion that may follow Miriam Hansen’s frame in which the vernacular modernism is a Hollywood-originated but locally articulated cultural phenomenon, to argue that the classic melodramatic mode, as Williams clearly elucidates, was simultaneously transplanted to and transformed in Chinese context. …show more content…
In this light, the analysis of A Spring River Flows East is enriched in both spatial and historical dimensions, not only as a local reconsideration of American dominated melodramatic mode, but also as a reformation and resurrection of pre-modern ideological representational rules in modern