| John Updike(1932-2009)was one of the most important,most productive,and most awarded writers in the United States in the second half of the 20thcentury.Since the 1950s,30 novels,10 collections of poems,14 criticism collections,and 18 short story collections have been published.His various works have won numerous awards at home and abroad,including almost all the important awards for literature in the United States.Rabbit Tetralogy,composed of Rabbit Run(1960),Rabbit Redux(1971),Rabbit is Rich(1981),and Rabbit at Rest(1991),is Updike's masterpiece and the greatest achievement in his oeuvre.Rabbit is Rich,the third novel of the Rabbit Tetralogy,won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,the American Book Award and the National Book Critics Award.The fourth novel Rabbit at Rest won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction again,the National Book Criticism Award and the Howells Award.In contemporary American literature,the publication of the Rabbit Tetralogy is considered as a landmark,and the character“Rabbit”Harry,one of the“m ost confusing literary figures in traditional American literature”,has become a classic figure in contemporary American literature.In Rabbit Tetralogy,historical events and details of daily life are closely interwoven.Great changes in American society and culture from the 1950s to the early 1990s are depicted in Rabbit Tetralogy,involving some important historical events of contemporary America such as the Vietnam War,the moon-landing,the energy crisis,and the ending of the Cold War,thus mirroring contemporary American society.Rabbit Tetralogy basically presents the endless pursuit of individual freedom and self-identity by the hero,the Rabbit,as well as the setbacks and failures encountered:where his honest pragmatism,his guilt,his arrogance,hisracismnarrow nationalism,and selfishness are given into a full play.,,Updike,in his Rabbit Tetralogy,has shaped a series of literary spaces in various forms,revealing the“cultural conflicts”of contemporary America,manifesting the evolution of the traditional values of American society,disclosing ordinary Americans'dilemma.Space occupies multiple spatial dimensions and conveys profound ideological connotations in the Rabbit Tetralogy series.Updike's“Rabbit Tetralogy”provides a perfect context for the literary application of space theory,and provides a new insight into literary criticism.From the interdisciplinary perspectives,i.e.the sociological theories,this dissertation,based on the related research results of Rabbit Tetralogy at home and abroad,and drawing upon Foucault's heterogeneous space theory,is aimed to comb the representation and origin of spatial heterogeneity of different kinds of literary spaces constructed in Updike's novels.Beauvoir's feminist criticism,Maslow's hierarchy of needs,Sigmund Freud's and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis theory,and Cornell's masculinity crisis theory are also applied the heterogeneity and attributes or specific literary space in Rabbit Tetralogy is discussed from four perspectives:gender spaces,psychological space,social space and culture space,which reveals abstract space construction in the novel and many social issues like the women's liberation movement,counter-cultural movement,social bondage of gender mechanism,domestic political,economic and cultural changes,as well as the interaction between individual psychological space writing and self-construction of characters in the novel.This dissertation consists of six parts.The introduction provides researches about Updike carried out both at home and abroad,and the evolution of contemporary spatial criticism theory.Then the theoretical framework of this dissertation-Michel Foucault's heterogeneous space theory,and the research purpose,significance and method of this dissertation are introduced.The main body consists of four chapters.Adopting Henri Lefebvre's“space production”theory of ternary dialectic,that is,the“lived”of space,the“conceived”of space,and the“perceived”of space,main subjects of this research are clarified four heterogeneous spaces,i.e.gender,psychological,social and cultural and the theoretical interpretation.For Foucault's heterotopias theory,the dissertation emphasized on the structural heterogeneity,spatial and temporal synchronicity,internal exclusivity and spatial transcendence of heterogeneous spaces.What's more,it probes into the ways in which these features are represented in the novel in terms of spaces of gender,psychology,society and culture.In the first chapter,“Confrontation and Compromise:the Gender Heterogeneity Space in Rabbit Tetralogy”,it is believed that people are social beings,and characters of different genders construct their own gender space in social communication.Thisdissertation probes into space expansion of women like Janise who is strongly influenced by the sexual liberation movement in 1960s.It also compares the shrinking of male space in Rabbit,Run and Rabbit at Rest.Analyzing the masculinity crisis of Harry,the Rabbit,the conflicts between gender spaces are explored.In the second chapter,“Desire and Impulse:the Psychological Heterogeneous Space in Rabbit Tetralogy,the author points out that the psychological space reveals the complexity of the multiple contradictions between individuals and society resulting from the different living environments and various psychological needs and desires.Adopting Freud and Lacan's theories,this chapter studies females'(like Janice)self-consciousness deriving from spatial displacement,and the repression of male self-consciousness caused by spatial juxtaposition.Based on the two novels,Rabbit Redux and Rabbit is Rich,the dissertation focuses on the conflicts between ego and id,ego and other,ego and society.In doing so,the focus of the study shifts to the psychological space of characters.In the third chapter,“Contradictions and Conflicts:the Social Heterogeneous Space in Rabbit Tetralogy”,it is suggested that the social space includes family space,work space and American social space.The family is the epitome of society.This chapter first focuses on the fragmentation and reorganization of the Rabbit family space.The differences in family background,educational background,capability and personality have contributed to the heterogeneity of the family space constructed by the marriage between Rabbit and Janice,which is one of the reasons for Rabbit's strong dissatisfaction with life.Rabbit,the protagonist who suffers from the disappointment,fear,tribulation and misfortune,was born in a lower-class family in the American society,is a prototype of the entire American society.Foucault pointed out that in a society of the same people or different nationalities,each relatively constant social stage or cultural form in different times is a heterogeneous space.The Rabbit family and the later temporary“new family”are the specific micro-social heterogeneous spaces.The American society from the late1950s to the early 1990s is the social heterogeneous space in the macro sense.Witnessing the conservatism in the 1950s,the turbulence in the 1960s,the mediocrity in the 1970s and the demise of values in the 1980s.Rabbit knows too well about is American social upheaval such as the Great Depression,the Vietnam War,the Black People's Rights Movement,sexual liberation,hippies,energy crisis,and drug abuse,etc.Analyzing the“R abbit Tetralogy”,the dissertation firstly discusses the family space,then moves on tothe work space and finally shifts to the American social space.It is pointed out that America is a violent space full of fierce conflicts.Thus,the significance of this research is also social-oriented.In the fourth chapter,“Void and Disillusionment:the Cultural Heterogeneous Space in Rabbit Tetralogy”.It is pointed out that the culture in this chapter refers to social behavior and norms in human society,like myth,philosophy and literature.This chapter elaborates on the heterogeneity caused by the innate contradiction of American Dream and Counter-Cultural movement,and the inevitability of its final disintegration.The beliefs and lack of religious feelings,the anxiety and loss of the“counter-cultural”movement,the pursuit and confusion of the“American Dream”,as well as their inherent contradictions and the inevitability of their eventual collapse reveal the“cultural contradictions”in contemporary American society caused by the transformation of values.The prevalence of hedonism in American society has deeply affected the emerging middle class,who hover between religious beliefs and desires.The Puritan tradition,once the spiritual pillar of the American people,is now in a precarious situation.The contradiction and conflict between the belief and the pursuit of self in the American culture are in full swing under the contemporary conditions and becoming increasingly fiercer.In the conclusion,in a broader context,this dissertation focuses on the spatial connotation in“Rabbit Tetralogy”and the three major issues,namely,“why he wrote space”,“what space he wrote”,and“how he wrote space”.In“Rabbit Tetralogy”,“space”is not only the place of the historical transformation of modern American society,but an important representation of the social changes.It is also an inevitable consequence of modern American society,which is the result of the current American social space change.On the other hand,this dissertation clarifies the literary space types in Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy,which are classified into four categories,i.e.gender space,psychological space,social space and cultural space.These literary Spaces are not only the production of physical space such as geographical landscape,but also the psychological of the characters'space and a sense of space of different genders,as well as the reproduction of American social and cultural space.In Updike's Rabbit Tetralogy,Harry,the Rabbit's personal misfortune and family breakdown are the epitome of American society.This dissertation,with different historical events as the background,explores the loss of religious belief in American society in post-industrial era,the decay of the traditional culture and value,and the innate contradiction of new culture and value,via the description of heterogeneity of the gender space,psychological space,social space and cultural space. |
PDF Full Text Request