Television Literature: a Successful Literary Genre of Today’s China

The seriality, in times and ways typical of the television, has become a defining feature of
modern Chinese culture. Written narratives, purposefully created to meet the consumer’s
expectations, find in the television storytelling a way to satisfy the needs of the readers. Needs
that are largely emotional than intellectual; more visceral than cerebral. The intention of this
speech is to elucidate the radical transformation of the notion of writing in the contemporary
Chinese literature, whereby books turn into a product comparable to tv series, music videos or
even videogames. In order to show this transformation the paper analyses two literary works: The
Dialogues according to Yu Dan and Zhou Meisen’s In the Name of People, whose publication has
followed the timing of the broadcasting of two television works.