Focus, Reflection And Reconstruction: Ruth Ooguan's Body Writing

Ruth Ozeki is a prominent Japanese-American writer whose novels have received numerous international literary awards,which has attracted wide attention around the world.With both personal features and universal factors,her works reflect the spirit of the American progress and the Oriental tranquility.From the perspective of body and the background of modernity,this paper makes a systematic study of three novels by Ruth Ozeki with the help of body theories.In addition to the introduction and conclusion,the paper concludes three parts for discussing the focalization and introspection of physical dilemma,analyzing literary reconstruction of body in Ruth Ozeki’s novels.Chapter One,“Disciplining and harming: the body in the cage of modernity”.A panoramic lens is used to grasp the universal living scene of the body written by Ozeki.By analyzing the situation of the body in the novel under the modern warfare,consumer society and medical ecology,the author anatomizes both the social and times reasons of the physical victimization.In modern society,the discipline,operation and treatment of the body are the means by which instrumental rationality controls the body.Chapter Two,“Questioning and struggling: reflection and breakthrough on the physical dilemma”.A close-up lens is used to study the reason why the modern body faces the dilemma of double fracture,which is,that the body experience is stripped away in the process of alienation from nature and society,and the body is fragmented and lost its original vitality.In response,Ruth Ozeki wrote about the people who kept fighting,but ultimately fail.They either tried to regain their physical experience through non-violent action,or to get rid of the nihility of being by suicide.Chapter three,“Caring and returning: the literary reconstruction of the body”.This chapter explores the way out for modern body.First of all,the body being a social existence,Ozeki wrote about the reconstruction of interpersonal relations.Secondly,the body mainly being the subject of labor,the writer created the image of non-utilitarian free grower.Finally,the body being the existence associated with the world,Ozeki portrays the Zen master image of practicing.The conclusion is that Ruth Ozeki regards the body as life and existence itself.In her body writing,neither did the writer stop at the point of portraying the harm and discipline of modernity to the body,nor did she stop at describing the struggle and resistance of the body,but ultimately she led to a kind of body care.Neither the rational body nor the irrational body is the ultimate pursuit of the writing.Ozeki’s body writing is to present the "footprint" instead of the "trace of mind".Her creation pursues a body that is fused with the world,free,and means life itself.