Cold Literature: On Gao Xingjian's novels and stories.

摘要

Gao Xingjian, the Nobel laureate in literature in 2000, announced "Cold Literature" to be the core of his literary mind and practice. This thesis examines how the writer accomplishes such a literary cannon in his fictional writings.; There are three conceptual and practical inquiries in the thesis research: Cognitively, Gao's notion of Cold Literature indicates a switch of textual construction from the Aristotelian model about plot, characterization and overall structure, to an exclusively concentrated mimesis of the inner being. Ideologically, through the Brechtian alienation-effect, Cold Literature builds a group of binary opposites, such as female/male, nature/society, religion/secularity, nether world/this world, etc., and re-evaluates the broader cultural codes underlying the textual binaries. Rhetorically, Gao's fictional narrative foregrounds a series of figures of rhetoric, such as pronouns as protagonists, stream-of-language, fantasies, merging of genres, etc., to defamiliarize/estrange the conventional literary norms as well as a seemingly intimate world by disrupting the acts of perception and recognition.; The thesis comes to the conclusion that, as the canon of Gao's literary practice, Cold Literature connotes a writer's ontological perceptions of the reality of literary creation, literary representation, and fictional narrative.