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A Collaged Narrative: A Comparative Study Of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow And Liu Suola's Nv Zhen Tang

Posted on:2009-09-22Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:X J ZhangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360248952418Subject:English Language and Literature
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
The American postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon is well known in American postmodern literature. He, a hermit, "emerges from that extraordinary proliferation of experimentation in the novel which so deeply shaped the direction of American fiction during the 1960s and 1970s" (Tanner, 1982: 90). He has published six novels so far, each of which has "queer conceiving", "obscure language", "many big themes", and advanced knowledge on science and technology, but each of them overwhelmed the critics and the mass in the world especially in America. His masterpiece Gravity's Rainbow (1973) which reconstructs the history at the end of WWII and the immediate postwar period reflects the realities in the 1960s in America. It "won the National Book Award and has since received a good deal of critical attention ..." (Chang Yaoxin, 2003: 501). Gravity's Rainbow is an enormous labyrinth in which broken pieces unrelated are mixed at random. The Chinese novelist of vanguard Liu Suola is well known both in Chinese modern literature and the music field. "Liu Sola (Liu Suola)'s writings have been translated into many languages" (Ray, 2006). and won a number of literary prizes in China, including "the 1988 Chinese National Novella Award" (Ray, 2006). Her novels are all about anti-tradition, and her writings are fragmented and superficial. Her masterpiece Nv Zhen Tang (2003) is also such a kind of illustrated long novel about several women's stories after 4000 A.D., in which newspapers, films, myths, ballads, diaries, history or whatever are mixed together. The main language style changes with the times. Meanwhile, different language styles are mixed together. "This political-mythological novel has been published (as: La grande (?)le des tortues-cochons) in French from SEUIL, Paris in 2005" (Ray, 2006).The two novels both have obviously used the postmodern writing technique, collage to express their thoughts of their society. This thesis will discuss the form and the effect of the collage of the two original texts from the aspects of time space-shift, plots, points of view, and cross-style and cross-kind language style, using the theories of postmodernism, narratology, feminism, stylistics and etc. within the scope of comparative literature. Through my perusing the two original texts, the deep hidden cultural factors and the social meanings behind the texts may be unfolded so that the readers may understand more deeply the development of respective traditional national cultures, and the common things after their collision in the modern times of consuming, advanced technology, and the current of mass culture under the general literature.The thesis consists of six parts as follows:Chapter one is the brief introduction of the two novels, the survey of the critical responses to Gravity's Rainbow and Nv Zhen Tang at home and abroad, and brief assumptions as well as methodologies used in this thesis to seek for the comparability of the two novels, and last my minor contributions.Chapter two is about a collaged narrative of time space-shift which will be divided into 3 sections: time-shift, space-shift and time space-shift.Chapter three is about a collaged narrative of plots. It will be divided by different themes. It will involve the plots of sacrifice, satire and dream.Chapter four is about a collaged narrative of points of view. The third-person narration and the mixed person narration will be discussed.Chapter five is about a collaged narrative of cross-style and cross-kind language style. The section of cross-style will compare from the collage of the ballad and the novel, inscription and novel, and advertisement and novel. The section of cross-kind language style will be divided into two parts: vulgarity and elegance, and solemnity and humor.From chapter two to chapter five, the penman's comments on Liu Suola's writing influenced by the American postmodern writing are concerned. The different cultural factors and the source of common thought behind the two original texts will be dug into. The differences, similarities of the two postmodern novelists' writing technique, collage, the collage effecting on the novels, and the penman's comments on Liu Suola's particular writing influenced by the American postmodern writings of the two novelists will be discussed in detail.Chapter six is the conclusion, in which the main idea discussed above, the limitation and problems to be further researched will be summarized. The collage's positive and negative effects on novel in the consumer times, the insufficiency of superficial writing, the writing problems appeared in the novels, the problems Chinese writers bring when they imitate the narration of postmodernism in Chinese context will be summarized in summary section. Although the Chinese novelist of vanguard Liu Suola has borrowed the American writing technique collage to her writing, the form, the writing purpose and the effects on the novels about the collage all change in the Chinese context. What's more, some unnatural traces of the imitating also appear. The collage borrowed from the postmodern school becomes a shackle for the development of the traditional Chinese literature.
Keywords/Search Tags:Collage, Narration, Postmodernism, Culture, Writing Technique
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