Fictionality and Reality in Narrative Discourse: A Reading of Four Contemporary Taiwanese WritersUniversal-Publishers, 2000 M01 20 - 178 pages This dissertation is an attempt to define a Chinese "modernism," exemplified by the narrative practices of four major writers in Taiwan today, from the perspective of comparative literature and recent development of literary theory. I propose that modernity of Taiwanese fiction is not so much a result of Western influences as an evolution of Chinese narrative tradition itself. To argue my point I delineate a poetics of Chinese narrative, from which I devise a method of reading and a criterion of evaluation for contemporary Taiwanese fiction in defining its achievement and historical significance. This study of Taiwanese fiction also aims at providing a better understanding of fundamental aesthetic assumptions of Western "modernism" in the context of its own literary tradition.
Chapter One, "Introduction," investigates the theoretical foundation and its line of development in Western and Chinese poetics respectively. It first examines the Platonic view of mimesis and Aristotelian aesthetic view of fictionality and their influence on the critical tradition, the continuity of the ancient battle between philosophy and poetry as seen in the structuralist and deconstructionist theories, then the relationship between subjective fictionality and ironic objectivity in Chinese poetics, the continuity of the dilemma in the Chinese novelists in their dual allegiance to the ideal and the real. A final section gives a critical overview of the literary scene in Taiwan. The following four chapters provide examples of the internal tension between fictionality and ironic awareness in the Taiwanese modernist texts. I suggest that instead of stretching the metaphorical potential of fiction to a highly intellectualized abstraction or playing down the interpretive claims of fiction by dramatizing its vulnerability like their Western counterpart, the Taiwanese modernists create their texts on the borderline between the high and the low. Self-assertive as well as self-denying, each of them confronts his own intellectual vision with paradox and ambivalence. In Ch'en Ying-chen, this is expressed as a battle between a lyrical vision of ideological values and an instinctive self-clowning, in Ch'i-teng Sheng, as a form of competition between pattern and contingency, in Wang Chen-ho, as a celebration and abuse of the fictionality of fiction, and in Wang Wen-hsing, an intense self-parody. I conclude that the sensitivity to the irrational and contradiction, inherent with a resistance to didacticism, constitutes the best part of the Chinese humanistic tradition, which is continuously enriched with new dimensions by the contemporary Taiwanese writers. |
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... expression of avant-gardism in the Chinese context is of another kind. I would propose in this study that modern Chinese fiction, which has been practiced most impressively in Taiwan since the early sixties, achieves its effects by ...
... expression can broaden our understanding of poetics of fiction as a whole. Reading in terms of textual tension between two fundamental narrative impulses may not only enhance our understanding of contemporary Taiwanese fiction but also ...
... expression of a man's rational personality . " 11 Aristotle underscores the psychological and more importantly , moral energy of making poetry which is sprung from an essentially intrinsic act of will . And it is here , we must point ...
... expression in spatial form.29 The modernist aesthetics of narrative is again strongly suggestive of the salvation-oriented Christian tradition that measures meaning of life by the transcendental sublimation of individual consciousness ...
... expression of ideas and insist on the primacy of language which exists in its own right . For them literature , like all other cultural activities , is grounded in a system . of signs ; it is preceded by the institution of language ...
Contents
1 | |
THEAPOCALYPTIC IMAGINATION | 62 |
ART AS A PROCESS OF LIFE | 85 |
THE FICTIVE AND THE REAL | 105 |
THE NOVEL AGAINST ITSELF | 129 |
CONCLUSION | 154 |
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Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and ... Margaret Hillenbrand No preview available - 2007 |
Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and ... Margaret Hillenbrand No preview available - 2007 |