Dancing among lost paradigms: Postmodernist discourse in contemporary Chinese literature.

摘要

This thesis examines the diverse aspects of postmodernity expressed in Chinese avant-garde writing as a reflection of the Chinese Zeitgeist of the 1980s and to a lesser extent in the early nineties, and investigates various postmodernist anti-paradigmatic discourses in avant-garde works through the study of how narrative functions in these works. In this thesis I focus my study on the narrative form of Chinese avant-garde fiction, which involves many postmodern issues, such as metafictionality, self-consciousness, self-referentiality, fragmentation, discontinuity, the language game, unrepresentationality, and intellectual unseriousness. A close investigation is also made of other aspects of the avant-garde enterprise such as subversion, violence, rehistoricization, memory, desire, sexuality, alienation, and irony. The avant-garde writers principally involved in this study include Mo Yan, Ma Yuan, Su Tong, Ge Fei, Yu Hua, Hong Feng, Ye Zhaoyan, and Sun Ganlu.; Chapter One, the Introduction, posits the argument for labeling the avant-garde works as "postmodern." Chapter Two inquires into the Chinese avant-gardists' antirealist introversion, a turning from the representation of the world to the fictive process of narration. Avant-garde writers such as Ma Yuan and Ge Fei engage in disintegrating the boundary between fiction and fact, and in building a labyrinthine narrative of gaming-with-words and gaming-with-worlds. Chapter Three continues to look into the writing of fiction as a metafictive process of self-referential and self-reflexive constructs, and examines the avant-garde narration embedded in subjectivized, spatialized reconfiguration. Chapter Four deals with the avant-garde subversion of the "truth" of history as a grand discourse or accepted belief, and the postmodernist stance to establish narrative voices and bodies that use memory to try to rehistoricize the past. Chapter Five scrutinizes the defamiliarization in language that frustrates the reader's habitualized linguistic recognition, and the avant-garde cold, playful presentation of cruelty and violence, as manifested in the works of Yu Hua and Ge Fei. Sun Ganlu's language of aesthetic disruptions even becomes a wild arena for manipulation and play, withdrawn from the split dual realm of signifiers and signifieds. The Conclusion states that the avant-garde literary experimentation in content and form is a self-absorbed, wild dancing among the lost paradigms of culture.