The Study Of Words-Images In Chu Tien-wen’s Novels

With the development of scientific technology progress and material consumption concepts, human beings really come into the "Reading Pictures Era" Social and cultural phenomena formed by visual media and visual products are becoming many scholars’subjects.The relationship between literature and images becomes a hot topic in literary theory area. On one hand, literature provides images with themes, artistic means, and literary works form the basis of raw video adaptation. On the other hand, the image elements with its highly intuitive, vivid, metaphorical characteristics become specific symbol systems corresponding to literary plot and characters. What’s more, the video works adapted from the literature also help the readers to further understand the literary works.Literary arts and visual arts learn from each other in the process of intertextuality, and they achieve a win-win situation. Chu Tien-wen caters to the rhythm of the visual culture times as well as not losing the depth of thought of writing,and she actualizes the full integration of literature and images.This paper consists of three chapters.The first chapter discusses the visual image characterization of Chu Tien-wen’s novels, taking full-length novels Notes Of A Desolate Man and The Words for examples. Besides collections of short stories such as The Legend, The Summer City and End Century Magnificence.In these novels, Chu used the advantage of"Ekphrasis and Representation"and established intertextual relationship between literary field and image field, creating visual arts, such as colors, images, advertising and spaces.The second chapter starts from the perspective of image, in order to study the image characteristics in her writing after she participating in Taiwan New Cinema. While maintaining the independence of literary language and aesthetic nature, she creatively absorbed cinematic presentation skills to generate video texts, such as integration of close-up shot, light shape, audio visual effect, long shot, montage and so on. The third chapter is mainly to investigate the reasons of her text visualization. From the subjective aspects, its mainly owes to Chu’s unique artistic insights and her delicate, emotional image thinking of female. From the objective aspects, its owes to the close relationship between literature and images in "Reading Pictures Era", the specific context of consumer culture, and the film aesthetics of Hou Hsiao-hsien.In the background of "Reading Pictures Era",Chu’s works show us a literature form which is not only full of visual images but also retaining relative independence. Female’s sensitive to colors, utterances, aesthetic styles, emotional qualities, conceptions of society and history are shown in her works. And her creation indicates one side of the literature development of female in Taiwan. She is confronted with oblivion by her words, which strengthen the memory of penetration with images, expressing realistic care and cultural reflection.