A Comparative Study Of The Rhetorical Reconstruction Of The Five Editions Of The Revolutionary Classic Youth Combatants In The War

As one of the revolutionary classics,Youth Combatants in the War has been revised by its author Xueke four times since its publication in 1958,thus leaving five editions for contemporary Chinese literature over the past 20 years with hundreds of thousands of varying expressions,a valuable resource for our studies.There have been many impressive achievements in their studies,which are summarized in the first session of the introduction of the present dissertation.The limitations of these studies in relation to the present further exploration,however,can be illustrated below:First,by the same criteria of judging edition studies,previous studies in Youth Combatants in the War are relatively lacking in edition awareness,too vague in edition location and even erroneous in edition relevance.Second,by the distinguishing features of the different versions,previous studies in Youth Combatants in the War overlook the fact of the transformation from political rhetoric to artistic rhetoric.The present dissertation sets out to make a tentative analysis of the above-mentioned limitations and then an exhaustive linear contrastive analysis of the five editions by their chronological order of 1958-1960,1960-1961,1961-1962 and 1962-1978,in order to bring to light the changes in content in the five editions.The logical line of reasoning about the changes between the latter edition and the former one presents “what”,“how”and “why” in terms of rhetorical reconstruction on the basis of scrutinized comparisons of different versions.The theoretical framework is applied of the two subjects(rhetor and audience)and the three analytical levels of discoursal,textual and philosophical reconstruction in Big Rhetoric to explorations of the features,causes and ecological factors behind the rhetorical reconstruction of the five versions.Focusing on the war narratives related to “battle”,sexual narratives related to “youth” and the class narratives governing the two along with the themes of the different editions of the novel such as class narratives,war narratives and sexual narratives,the present dissertation analyzes such factors as the length of edition changes,the changing trend and modifying intention in reference to expansion,deletion,replacement and the composite form of addition-deletion replacement.Among the major findings are: expansion takes place mainly in the rhetorical reconstruction of class and war narratives,and is partly scattered in that of sexual narrative;replacement and deletion are distributed quite evenly in the reconstruction of class,war and sexual narratives;the composite form of addition-deletion replacement resides mainly in the reconstruction of positive and negative images in war narratives as well as the role displacement and rhetorical reconstruction in sexual narratives.The present dissertation concludes that each revision of Youth Combatants in the War is essentially a rhetorical reconstruction of its former edition under the specific ideological stipulation,a different interpretation of a story,a reconstruction of different text presentation forms and a rhetorical message that underlies the way of human existence.These findings contribute to outlining the changing narrative way,to making a comprehensive semantic analysis,and to analyzing the gap between the way the author narrates his story and the aesthetic expectations of its readers listening to the story(e.g.the influence of the readers' reading orientation on the different versions of the sisters experiencing the rhetorical reconstruction of [+sacrifice] ?[-sacrifice]?[+sacrifice]),the interaction between an individual and the times he lives in,the author's active or passive adjustment,and rhetorical modifications to fit with ideological trends and institutions governing artistic creation.All this is intended to bring home historical and cultural messages underneath the intricate interaction of literary imagination and political imagination in an effort to transform pieces of information scattered in different editions of the work into ordered resources for rhetorical reinterpretation.Viewed from today's perspective,the rhetorical reconstruction of the different editions of Youth Combatants in the War appears to have greater homogeneity than heterogeneity with the purity of revolution partially covering the complexity of human beings.However,that is the spiritual energy at those times and the Red genes that influence those contemporaries and later generations.The artistic “I” and the political “I”in literary production and reproduction at those times remain the discourse filed for further explorations in the reconstruction of the Red Classic editions.The present dissertation will hopefully distinguish itself from other studies in terms of creating a platform with a more open disciplinary image and ecology in which cross-disciplinary academic generation can be ensured for exploring the interface of rhetorical and literary studies.