Unfinished Aesthetic Journey

The prosperity of the daily life narration in the feministic novels is conspicuous in the new epoch. Women writers are widely taking as their starting point writing the daily life issues such as dining and housing. Their texts, heavily endowed with women characters, strikingly narrate the life experiences, interest, ideals and creeds with. They seek persistently legitimacy of daily life, explore consciously its prime truth, and attempt to construct a way of poetic existence which comes from daily life and transcends its limit and restriction. The consciousness of women novelists in the poetic exploration of daily life has elicited the following theoretical questions in literary studies. How can we understand daily life and daily existence? How can we make our understanding more appropriate for the prime truth of human existence, and hence make our existence more meaningful? What perspective and stance do we choose to interpret more reasonably and effectively the rich and complex aesthetic content in the texts of women's daily life in the new epoch? The past philosophical and poetic theories have devaluated the significance and value of daily life, and caused a shortage of theoretical resources. Hence, researchers are brought into a perplexity and bias in value judgment.In order to expound deeply and theoretically this literary phenomenon, this dissertation, based on the theoretical achievements of modern philosophy and aesthetics of existence as well as feministic literary studies, attempts to re-interpret women writers'dual description of daily life. The dissertation places women writers'daily life texts in the ontological scope of human existence. It deploys"poeticity"─—- the integral existence of human beings / women / individuals─—- as a standard of value, and illustrates dialectically the material / spiritual, daily / ultimate, hypo-physical / hyper-physical, poetic / non-poetic issues involved in women writers'novels. It tries to unveil that these women writers are, on the one hand, open to human existence in the exploration of daily life; on the other hand, they are shadowed in the aesthetic meditation on human existence. It further reviews the new ideas of their exploration, and the new frontiers expanded by them, and discusses how they have changed the past literary discourses of poetic existence from the male perspective.With the theoretical stance of cultural criticism, this dissertation, on the basis of close reading, applies synthetically the methods of philosophical criticism, historical criticism and gender criticism in the value analysis and aesthetic evaluation on women writers'writing inclination of daily life. It is composed of an introductory part, a body part and a conclusion.The introduction analyzes the cultural contexts arising from the daily life of the new epoch, and the historical evolution of the modern women writers'exploration toward the daily life triggered by this context. This part presents the theoretical content of the core concepts of"daily life"and"poeticity", and points out the objects, problems, perspectives, methods and value pivots of the research in this dissertation.The three chapters in the body part center on women writers'depiction of the meta issues.The first chapter discusses city novels, and reviews how women writers consider and write townspeople. This chapter expounds emphatically three typical cases: Zhang Xin's re-writing the images of"desire subjects", Wang Anyi's aesthetical discovery of the practice subjects of urban life, and Chi Li's conversion from subjectivity dissolution of daily life individuals into characterization of"retrospection subjects". These cases reveal clearly the women writers'rational meditation on the subjectivity consciousness of townspeople in the transitional period, and the choice they have made in such issues as material life, spiritual life, daily existence and ultimate existence.Chapter Two reviews women writers'reflection on love and marriage in the daily world. It analyzes Zhang Kangkang's imagination and re-construction of the subjects of modern love and marriage, Jiang Yun's consideration and narration of classical love, Chi Zijian's narration of daily love, and Zhang Jie's biased writing of sexual love. These cases show that the narration of love and marriage can approach their poetic prime truth only by means of sticking to the holistic views on love and marriage, and a writer should start from the holistic views on existence and life of human beings / women / individuals.Chapter Three is concentrated on the research of the modern consciousness on human body arising from women writers'physical writing in the new epoch. As an important type of daily existence, the physical existence is remarkably emphasized by in women writers'novels, which is mainly resulted from the fact that human body has long been shadowed and oppressed by culture, morals, truth and power. This chapter takes as typical cases Wang Anyi and Tie Ning's narration of sex and Lin Bai's physical writing, and analyzes the aesthetic characteristics of their physical exploration by means of close reading. It also presents a counter-case of the physical writing of"beauty writers", and points out their aesthetic inappropriateness in that they use sex to replace human nature, and physical property to replace spiritual and ethical property.Finally, this dissertation summarizes inductively and construes theoretically the poetic exploration of women novelists in the new epoch into daily life, and points out that their exploration is not only a re-interpretation of daily life and daily existence, but also a re-exploration into the poetic existence of human beings, and that it indicates an earnest search of feministic literature into the more"humanized"new living interest, the means of existence and the aesthetic dimension.