| This dissertation combines theoretical examination and textual analysis of post-Mao avant-garde fiction within the general context of modern Chinese history and literature. It focuses on the interrelations between historical psychology and representational mode, and between political discourse and literary rhetoric.;The main argument of the introduction is that Chinese avant-garde fiction has formed a new paradigm that reactivates the problematics inherent in the corpus of twentieth-century Chinese fiction. Representational reason, which constructs the paradigmatic absoluteness of the narratorial/authorial subjectivity, can be exposed as unstable and self-questionable. The avant-garde narrative becomes an evocation of the heterogeneous specter repressed in the homogeneity of the modern paradigm.;The main chapters of the dissertation investigate the works of six representative Chinese avant-garde fiction writers: Can Xue, Ge Fei, Ma Yuan, Mo Yan, Xu Xiaohe, and Yu Hua. The readings of their works are based on some theoretical considerations of the psychological and rhetorical factors that formulate their aesthetic characteristics. The primary point starts from the fact that the traumatic experiences that the post-Mao writers have had from the historical violence incapacitate the proper representation of their writings. To trace the painful memory is to trace the injured subjectivity that fails to represent in a comprehensive way. The inadequacy of representation becomes the origin of irony--the principal feature of Chinese avant-garde fiction--which refers to the incessant deviations within both the verbal and the structural prototypes of the modern paradigm.;The postscript, by drawing the affinity between the literary modernity and the political totality, concludes that the Chinese avant-garde narrative is an aesthetic subversion of the foundation of political totalitarianism, i.e., the Mao-Deng master-discourse. |
