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Artistic Freedom In John Fowles's Fiction

Posted on:2009-09-07Degree:DoctorType:Dissertation
Country:ChinaCandidate:W X WangFull Text:PDF
GTID:1115360272962816Subject:English Language and Literature
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John Fowles (1926-2005) is under the influence of French existentialism. Freedom, one of the key concepts in French existentialism, becomes the hallmark of his fiction. Western critics have made a rather exhaustive study of freedoms in Fowles's fiction, but unfortunately, most of them have circumscribed their study within the scope of tangible freedom while neglecting artistic freedom. Lynch has divided the freedoms in The French Lieutenant's Woman into three categories: existential, social and narrative. His emphasis on narrative freedom has shifted the focus from tangible freedom to artistic freedom. However, narrative freedom is not the whole-sight freedom in Fowles's fiction, though it may serve as a good topic for case study. The more whole-sight freedom is artistic freedom, the essence of which is that human freedom lives in human art. Any"outer-imposed restriction on artistic methods and aims"is intolerable. All artists have to"range the full extent of their own lives freely."Fowles's fiction serves as a genuine account of the pilgrimage to artistic freedom, which conveys the writer's melancholy on the predicament of art existence and his call for artistic freedom.Taking artistic freedom as its pivot, this dissertation chooses Fowles's four novels, i.e. The Collector, The Magus, The French Lieutenant's Woman and Mantissa to illustrate Fowles's pilgrimage to artistic freedom as reflected in his fiction. Each novel is given a single chapter. The introduction focuses on the connotations of artistic freedom as reflected in Fowles's fiction and nonfiction. It also enumerates the basic arguments and presents the general layout of the whole dissertation. The conclusion offers a brief summary of the major arguments of the dissertation and briefly expounds artistic freedom as reflected in Fowles's other fictional works. The body of the dissertation is divided into four chapters. Chapter One is entitled"The Collector: The Uncollectible Artistic Freedom". It takes the confrontation between Clegg and Miranda as the confrontation of the many versus the few, or to put it more specific, the confrontation of collector-consciousness versus artistic freedom. Artistic freedom is uncollectible. Any collecting may result in tragic ending. Meanwhile, artistic freedom will never give in to collector-consciousness. The call for artistic freedom will break through the prison house of collector-consciousness and endeavor to enlighten the public. Chapter Two is entitled"The Magus: The Artist's Self-imposed Exile". The major impediment to Urfe's development as a young artist is the middle-class climate. Urfe's sexual conquest is a kind of mistaken freedom. His self-imposed exile to Greece is the genuine artistic freedom. Urfe's self-imposed exile is conducive to the young artist's maturation, which enables him to avoid the reproduction of Miranda's tragedy. Chapter Three is entitled"The French Lieutenant's Woman: The Quest for Narrative Freedom". It takes narrative freedom, the pivot of which is the characters'freedom, as the core of artistic freedom. The generating force of narrative freedom is Sarah's invisibility and visibility. Sarah's invisibility not only provides enough space for the construction of her female subjectivity, but also presents other characters, the narrator and the author with relative freedom. Her visibility will jeopardize the"order"of freedom. Chapter Four is entitled"Mantissa: Freedom and Responsibility of Fictional Narrative". It takes Mantissa as the metaphor of literary creation. Writing fictional narrative is the writer's responsibility, the presupposition of which is to offer the characters enough freedom. Freedom and responsibility constitutes the paradox of fictional narrative. The generating force of artistic freedom is the writer's amnesia and its treatment. The writer is searching for possibility (treatment) in the context of impossibility (amnesia). The presupposition of changing impossibility into possibility is to offer enough freedom to the Muses.In The Collector and The Magus, the artists are searching for artistic freedom in the world of reality. They are struggling against the outer-imposed restrictions on art. Miranda is struggling against the collector-consciousness while Urfe is struggling against the suffocating middle-class climate. In The French Lieutenant's Woman and Mantissa, the artists are searching for artistic freedom within fictional narrative. They attach more importance to the infrastructure of literature. The two novels are both metafictional novels. The former lays emphasis on the writing principle while the latter focuses on the paradox of literary creation. The former is the free choice of the novelists at the crossroad and the latter is the writer's exploration of artistic freedom in the shadow of poststructuralist theories.
Keywords/Search Tags:artistic freedom, collector-consciousness, self-imposed exile, narrative freedom, freedom & responsibility
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