The collapse of the Taibo Temple: A study of 'The Unofficial History of the Scholars'.

摘要

My dissertation explores the complex thematic and narrative scheme of The Unofficial History of the Scholars. My study shows that the novel creates two different narrative worlds: a mundane world and a ritualized world. The former falls away from the control of normative social order; the latter shows the need to reimpose order upon the mundane world. The former is governed, so to speak, by non-traditional narrative, which undermines the conventional model of representation and interpretation; the latter indicates an effort to revive that model. Since the non-traditional narrative suspends the possibility of any positive claims and evaluations, the juxtaposition of the ritualized world and the mundane world does not lead to the establishment of a binary structure of values. The representation of the ritualized world is thus left struggling between necessity and impossibility. The purpose of my dissertation is to reveal the internal tension of the novel as well as its ideological and narrative significance.;My dissertation consists of five parts: the introduction reviews the scholarships of The Scholars, defines the problems that remain unresolved and delineates a framework for the following discussion. Part Two focuses on the section from Chapters 2 to 30 of the novel, with special concern for the decline of traditional narrative as well as its significance in the context on Ming and Qing literary creation. Part Three moves to the section from Chapters 31 to 37. With reference to Ming and Qing discourse on Confucian ritualism, I examine the representation of the Taibo ceremony, the central event of the novel. Part Four is concerned with the confrontation between the ritualized world and the mundane world that occurs primarily in the section of the novel form Chapters 38 to 55. In this section, I argue, the moral vision of the ritualized world becomes obscured: it is either contextualized or located in a domain disengaged from current human activity and hence from narrative per se. Following the same line of argument, Part Five further reveals the dilemma of the ritualized world caught in the context of the mundane world.