Narrative Ethics Of Modern Steering

Narrative is a way of being for person as well as a way to tell stories; narrative is one kind of ethics as well as a sort of aesthetics. Why is narrative a type of aesthetics? Because what narrative concerns are special circumstances and contingencies of human ethic, ups and downs of individual fate, and people's crys, groans, sighs, yell, hopes for the vicissitudes of life. What narrative guards are incomplete lives, even abysmal scenes of humanity. It is a coordinate of being which shows how to live that narrative provides.Neither a simple combination of "narrative" and "ethnic" nor a discussion of ethical issues to which narrative refers, "narrative ethic", as an ethical narrative, relates to how to parse lives and console existences in its discourse by its ethical form. Once a narrative emerges, an ethical consequence will be produced necessarily during its progressing,which puts character's destiny and reader's fate closely together and awakes everyone's inner sense of life, corroborating that being is one kind of ethical position also.One of the signs that modern fiction appears is depicting individual experiences. Those who are freakish or sick, who incarcerate themselves to studies or bedrooms, who are prisoners of their own hearts, are real protagonists of modern fictions. The changes in narrative from collective experiences to individual experiences, from facing public (suck as story-telling and drama) to facing selfhood (composing upon paper and computer), from stories of social history to inner experiences, are changes of ethical position as well. Therefore, narrative repeats lives as well as creates possibilities of life, and that "possibility of life" is no other than ultimate purpose of narrative ethic.What this thesis focuses on are the position and swerves of narrative as an ethic in Chinese fictions on the twentieth century. The first chapter, introduction, along with identifing the possible issues existing in nowaday studies, probes into the relationship of narrative and ethic, explaining the current situation of study and the approach of research in this thesis. The second chapter brings forward that ethical narrative will not vanish in our lives although narrative theory may decay as a subject and a craft of writing. The narrative tradition of Chinese literature not only cares for society, reality, nationality, human relations, but has its tendency of facing existence, probing the meaning of life, transcending goodevil, making for width and benevolence of being. This tendency, represented by Cao Xueqin, Lu Xun, Shen Congwen, Zhang Ailing, is responsed deeply by some contemporary writers also.The third chapter of this paper explores individual fate under the demotic ethic and collective ethic. Three cases are selected:"Literature of Left-wing" depicts intricately the grand narratives of revolution, which could be detected by the way it disposes "body" discourse; "Liberalistic Literature" at later 1940s reveals the individual struggles under the demotic ethic and military writing-standard, with its transcendent spirit and free quality as a fatastic paragraph of literature history. Besides, the narrative logic of "Literature of 17 years" submits to an overall discourse of the age in which most of individuals have to be silence. What those ethical swerves of narrative exhibit are not only the encounters of Chinese literature but also the vicissitudes of fate of Chinese. The forth chapter discusses life narrative under individual ethic. It was in "new era" that individual narrative was established and became mature. Contemporary fiction has arrived at a new ethical commentate for individual being, exploring a brand-new space of life, which can be found out from Tie Ning's discovering and describing about good, Yu Hua's parsing and scanning about evil, Chen Xiwo's facing and resisting about desperation.The fifth chapter advances that since the new century planty of Chinese writers have completed their narrative turnings by withdrawing from borrowing from west to returning to Chinese tradition, which has been corroborated by four novels selected in this chapter. Writers like Mo Yan and Ge fei have begun to pay attention to the becauty of humanity in China, the life experance of Chinsese, the inspirations from Chinese vernaculars and writing principles. They have inspired more and more Chinese writers to turn their steps to narrative self-awareness of indigenous discourse. The sixth chapter continues to discuss the recent narrative changes of Chinese fictions, pointing out that "experience" and "story" along with "body" and "desire" are two pairs of key words in Chinese fictions in the past ten or more years. The latent force that makes those key words thriving is the spring up of consumer society. However, the lack of fiction experience and identical personal-writing force us to ponder that how to combine body with soul perfectly in narrative, and how to develop a narrative of soul with reemphasizing literature as an aesthetic idolum and a lingual Utopia. This paper takes this appeal as the narrative prospect of contemporary fictions.Analysing every narrative swerve in Chinese modern literature and its ethical aftermath allows us to renewedly understand that literature is a type of knowledge of life, and narrative ethic is an ethic of being, meanwhile, fiction writing is an affair of language as well as an affair of ethic.