The self in dialogue: Refiguring the subject in Chinese modernity.

摘要

The dissertation intends to redefine the intellectual terrain for one of the major issues of Chinese modernity--how the Self was conceived simultaneously via/as/by the Other. Approaching it from a perceptual-discursive angle, I examine the conflict and interplay between vitalism and determinism as they unfolded in early modern China (1910-1930), which serve as social backdrops for my critique of the continuum aligning the "lesser self" with the "greater self," be it through intuition or teleology. I believe studying the cognitive configuration of the subject is pertinent because it is where models of Confucian self-cultivation and the Western concept of Bildung are contested and mediated each through the other, thus energizing as well as complicating the birth of the modern Chinese subject.; China's entry into the modern times is such that the self to be conceived as a subject out of its traditional past has to encounter such rites of passage as dislocation, rediscovery and refiguration of the self. And this process is often entangled with the issue of cognitive progress from the individual to the collective. As Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, Qu Qiubai, Ye Shaojun, Lu Yin and other writers have shown through their fiction narratives, the formative process is beset with existential anxiety, intellectual and cultural mediation. I have observed how these writers mediated the differences between the intuitive knowing of a Confucian vitalist transcendence, a Buddhist nonself, a lyrical epiphany on the one hand, and the rational Bildung of an empirical and scientific development on the other. Specifically, I have examined the distinct manners in which realizing the self teleologically means (a) abandoning a Western-inspired self to return to moral elevation of the self while estranging and mystifying the other (Yu Dafu); (b) giving up a literary mode of conception of reality in favor of one visually receptive and coercive so that the individual mind is subsumed in an ideologically potent gaze and collective identity (Qu Qiubai); (c) averting the impasse of a transcending lyrical self by interacting with social movements only to have the self diminished and denied in the influx of social changes (Ye Shaojun); (d) deleting an internalized male-centric self by mirroring and hijacking it via a "performative" fulfillment of the feminist individual who is still left searching for a more definite identity (Feng Yuanjun and Lu Yin). In his own way, Lu Xun poses an aporetic and more disturbing vision of the modern self, challenging the legitimacy of a positivistic development of it. But he stops short of a total rejection, poised with critical distance and self-reflexivity in his encounter with the other.; In view of the fact that these writers end up effacing the individual self, either retreating to an enclosed self or being converted to a depersonalized subject, I have argued that such mediation is at once incited and impeded by their notion of "otherness," and therefore questioned whether the self/other polarity is fixed, determinate and teleologically tenable in the Chinese context.