| By "problematics" I mean the reconstitution of the problem--the practice of what has been called "realism"--not as a closed set of motives, but as an ideological field, a dynamic textual space in which the manifested coherence of the represented reality can be thoroughly analyzed. This study investigates the cultural and historical effectiveness of the overall "ideology of realism" by highlighting the cultural politics of its discourse within the textual productions of two clusters of "problems": despair and desire.Part II is a treatment of the "Discourses of Desire," the impossible representation of self in its absence, in the "other," in what the self desires. Whether this "other," as object of desire, is woman, money, or power, its dynamic interactions with the self are what materialize the formation of consciousness for the subject in history. By describing the dialectic of desire in Lao She's Camel Xiangzi, I examine the repression of subjectivity within the paradigm of rationality in early modern China. From self-consciousness and commodity fetishism, I then move on to the mode of production itself by decoding Mao Dun's Midnight through an analysis of its mode of signification, thus revealing the ideological implications of such realist categories as "point of view" and "omniscience." Finally, with Mao Dun's "Spring Silkworms" and Shen Congwen's Border Town, I study the superimposition of two discursive paradigms ("myth" and "history") in the "idyllic" form of realism as they manifest themselves in the time-space organizations (chronotopes) of its narrative.In Part I, "Formations of Despair," I address the question of representation through both the discourse on the "new women" as it emerged in the aesthetic and historical dimensions of the post-MayFourth era, and the libidinal formation of despair under the sociocultural dynamic of love-revolution relationships. After the realist obsession with despair is related to the self/other dichotomy inscribed in the representation of women by Lu Xun, Yu Dafu, and Mao Dun, the crisis of consciousness is approached from the perspective of Eros (Life-instinct) as I respond to the interplay of love and revolution in Mao Dun's Rainbow. |
