AMES, Iowa -- Aili Mu, assistant professor of foreign languages and literatures at Iowa State University, and two colleagues have been awarded a $75,000 National Endowment for the Humanities grant.
Mu, along with Howard Goldblath, Notre Dame University, Notre Dame, Ind., and Julie Chiu, Lingnam University, Hong Kong, will use the grant to compile a bilingual edition of "An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Short-short Stories."
Mu and her colleagues will select 100 representative stories from the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan for the anthology. Selected authors will be interviewed for narratives and the stories will be translated and edited.
Short-short stories are a subgenre of Chinese fiction about 1,500 to 3,000 (Chinese) characters in length. Mu says that in the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, there are thousands of journals, magazines, newspapers and Web sites, with circulations in the millions, that publish these stories.
"Contemporary Chinese short-short stories are a new literary genre that is sensitive to China's market economy," Mu said. "They reflect what is happening in China at the most fundamental level in the daily experiences of its people. This genre is a literary phenomena in China and I think it can be used to look not only at the country's social and economic systems, but popular culture as well."