On Geling Yan: The Literary Dancer

Geling Yan is a well-established Chinese contemporary novelist, and she is a unique writer. She has published prolifically and repeatedly won prestigious literary awards. Her works have received wide acclaim home and abroad, for their wide range of subjects, deep insights into human nature, and original, sophisticated language style. In recent ten years, the academic study on Geling Yan has achieved greatly. But a large proportion of the academic papers expound their views on such topics as human nature, female characters, identity verification and so on, which actually sets a limit to the study. Under such conditions, a new, fresh and creative perspective is urgently needed to make the study active.It is well-known that before her literary career, Yan served in People’s Liberation Army as a dancer in an entertainment troupe. Dance, an exquisite form of art, is composed of body language and thus has something in common with literary languge. Yan changed her profession from a dancer to a writer, but has always kept her dancing spirit, which is transplanted into her literary works and causes remarkable artistic features. Critical theories and criticisms have seldom involved dance, for generally speaking it does not have much to do with literature. But Yan is the very exception. She is an ex-dancer, or a dancer and writer, so dance has a lot to do with her writing and deserves due attention and special study. Dance is an original idea in this dissertation, since no scholar has studied Yan the writer from such an angle. It composes a good part of Chapter Four, which also includes other original ideas like music and painting. These different forms of arts, may well draw an analogy to literature and shed the light on Yan’s writing, especially her artistic realm. Zong Baihua, the famous scholar of aesthetics, points out that the highest realm, or the ideal state of all sorts of arts, is "dangcing." Guided by this view point of his, this dissertation has dancing as a dominant image and is entitled "On Geling Yan:The Literary Dancer." It tries to reveal Yan’s unique contribution to Chinese literature by discussing her literary spirits, literary gestures, artistic realm and so on. The Introduction explains the plot of this dissertation. Based on the summary and analysis of the current Yan study, it clarifies its strong points and weak points, and advances the emphasis and originality of this dissertation, which are more inspired by the problems of the study and are intended as an attempt to solve them.Chapter One is an attempt to interprete Yan’s literary world from two mensions: physical and spiritual. Yan’s rich experiences and knowledge in life build up the "base" of her literary world, while the "superstructure" is constituted by her spiritual space. In this chapter, the author designs a novel form of "existence codes" to illustrate Yan. The "codes" are the keys to her literary world. In her physical realm, the author not only lists the factors like childhood, army, tibet and migration which are often noticed to have vital influence on her writing, but also lists other factors like dance, insomnia and marriage which are considered to have also exerted strong influence but are neglected otherwise. In the spiritual realm, the author would rather not repeat the cliches in Yan’s study like "weak and strong," "femininity and maternity," but arrange these ideas with a fresh eye and list a series of codes:"the loser, the lowest, and the folk," with the opinion that Chinese Taoist philosophy is embodied in Yan’s typical characters like Siao Yu, Fusang and Grape. Another series of codes, "absurdity & fantasy," are initiatively put forward by the author, and regarded as part of Yan’s outlook on life and world as well as important aesthetic characteristics of her works.Chapter Two discusses the narrative ethics in Yan’s works, with the key word "margin;" and Chapter Three discusses her exploration in psychology, with the key word "extremity." The two chapters are different aspects of Yan’s depiction of human nature, and the two key words well describe her literary gestures. In particular, the author draws attention to Yan’s ingenious ability in manipulating absurd, abnomal and unbelievable stories and making them fair, sensible and natural.Chapter Four, as mentioned above, aims to appreciate the artistic realm of Yan’s works with the analogy of other forms of arts like dance, music and painting. Different art forms contribute to Yan’s imagination and open up a broad artistic space for her. Chapter Five is a historical study of Geling Yan’s works in her two literary stages:before and after her immigration to US, and is also a comparative study of Yan with her contemporaries and peers. The purpose is to observe the evolution of her works and demonstrate her uniqueness from the perspective of literature history. Detailed analysis is given to The Female Grasslands, her beloved novel.The author tries to write this dissertation in a lively, interesting and beautiful style.