A Comparative Study Between Sherwood Anderson And Shi Zhecun Under The Influence Of Freudianism

At the beginning of last century, Freudianism swept through the culture circle in Europe and America, and it came to China in the 1920s, thus the large-scale acceptance tide began to take shape among the culture circle of the east and the west. In the midst of this tide, two dominant writers in America and China during -—Sherwood Anderson and Shi Zhecun both accepted this theory with a critical vision, and flexibly utilized it in their own literary creation, evolving as one of the initiative representatives of modernistic literature in America and China respectively. Therefore this dissertation tries to make a comparative text analysis presented by the two writers during the process of acceptance.In theme, two writers creatively made use of the theory on sex instinct, the theory of the unconscious and the structure of the mind, and the theory of dreams in their portrayal of the characters' unconscious mind hidden deep under the consciousness, and put the portrayal in capacious social background, in place of the Freudian way psychoanalyzing from the biological or pathological perspectives. In this way, the width, depth and expressive force are strengthened. In technique, in order to reflect characters' psychological undercurrent more veritably and thoroughly, both writers consciously applied the stream-of-consciousness technique, partly originated from Freudianism, exhibiting the complicated inner conflicts more smoothly and naturally.Of course, as writers under different regional environment, they exhibited different traditional peculiarities of the east and the west. Anderson embedded the widely used western short story writing technique "epiphany" to present momentary beauty out of commonplace. Nevertheless, Shi Zhecun, on the other hand, adopted the form of Chinese old style novels especially the narrative style of the Song and Yuan scripts for story-telling and his own cultivation of Chinese classical literature especially Chinese classical poetry in his stories, creating a graceful poetic verve.