Alienation and the motif of the unlived life in contemporary Chinese literature (Yu Hua, Su Tong, Mo Yan).

摘要

This dissertation seeks to inquire into the literary expressions of alienation in post-Mao China. The fictions of Liu Heng (b. 1954), Yu Hua (b. 1960), Su Tong (b. 1963), and Mo Yan (b. 1956) are representative of those aspects of post-Mao writing that have also been identified as principal attributes of the recently resuscitated concept of postmodern alienation in the West: fragmentation, discontinuity, and unrepresentability.; The first chapter introduces the concept of alienation in the West and China and relates it to issues of post-Mao cultural change and the recent debate on postmodernity in Chinese literary studies.; Chapter two inquires into the theme of the unlived life as the governing literary motif of post-Mao fragmentation. Feelings of void and loss, the lack of opportunity and of a frame of reference, as well as contingent death correspond to an alienation from life itself in which the subject experiences fragmentation so profoundly that life is perceived as hazardous and without teleological purpose.; Chapter three looks into the writing of historiographic fiction as an expression of discontinuity. The structural dimensions of historiographic metafiction also acid to the felt discontinuities of history and life as referent, representation, and the knowability of past and memory alike are rendered fallible. As a result, the subject is incapable of positioning him or herself personally or historically.; Chapter four deals with violence as the outcome of the unlived life. As random and excessive violence is exacted on the body, the subject becomes a signifier of destitution and ressentiment. In Yu Hua's fiction in particular, violence becomes the plot itself and a symbol of something that has hitherto been unrepresented. It testifies to a reality beyond our ken, something that evades all previously known representation and understanding.; Chapter five briefly attempts to draw some conclusions from this inquiry and argues that the writing of post-Mao alienation is a rhetoric of crisis. This rhetoric institutes a counter-hegemonic discourse not unknown to other national literatures that had to re-establish themselves after the breakdown of totalitarianism.