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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... 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 ...
... alone. The tendency to uphold the supremacy of fictionality has had a long history since antiquity. It reenacts the traditional concept of the poet as priest of high consciousness . That this view should be intensified 1.
... poets began to to be challenged by philosophers. Plato's famous objection of poetry in Book X of the Republic is a value judgment as to what true reality is from a metaphysical point of view, from which poetry is conceived as inferior ...
... poetry . 8 Thus " mimesis , " the central notion in Western poetics was in its first conception remarkably negative ... poetry to the investigation of the inner , spiritual source and hence the value of poetry . He argues that poetry ...
... poetry , the former concerned with what has happened while the latter with what might happen . " Poetry , therefore , " Aristotle claimed , " is a more philosophical and a higher thing than history : for poetry tends to express the ...
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 |