Reflection On Body Writing Phenomena

Body writing is an attractive literary phenomenon that arouses many disputes. Even among the literary critics, there exist various concepts on the way to define this literary phenomenon, which lead to a debate of "one term with various definitions".Through a literature review of the disputes on "body writing", this thesis tries to present the author's personal understanding to this literary phenomenon with theoretical and practical supports in the perspective of multifaceted connotations of "body". Though sex writing is the most sensitive and popular part of body writing, sex is not the sole thematic component of the latter, because the multifaceted connotations of "body" has set the multiple thematic components of body writing, such as disease, death, heredity, diet, kin and so on, which, besides sex, all belong to "body" and "body writing" in a broad sense.This thesis includes five parts:The introduction makes a brief presentation of the related disputes on "body writing" and suggests the major ideas of this thesis. The second part presents the multifaceted connotations of "body" and the relation between each other by analysing the development of the connotations of this term respectively in Chinese and western contexts. The following chapter proposes that "body writing" proper is a multifaceted term, exploring the description of diet, the experience of diseases, death and so on and the reason for the popularity of sex writing, etc. The fourth part probes into the influence of traditional culture on body writing and the final part the relation between body writing...