Study On Yan Ge-ling's "Scar Memory" Novels

“The Great Cultural Revolution” is one of the most significant and historical events in contemporary China,which has had a great impact on the lives and feelings of people at that time.Although it has already past more than forty years,there are many authors still remember this topic.Yan Geling,who is the most influential and capable female Chinese writer now settling down in America,she experienced “the Great Cultural Revolution” when she was young,and this experience brought her lifelong spiritual trauma.Among all of her works,I think there is one kind of works which is very fascinating and valuable — “the Great Cultural Revolution” works.This paper studies on Yan Geling's “Scar Memory” novels,and this “Scar Memory” especially refers to the traumatic memory that “the Great Cultural Revolution” brought to people.Based on her own memory and other people's story,Yan Geling also uses fiction and imagination in her novels.In addition to that,she is also good at unique narrative techniques,so her novels are displayed to us a very personalized “ Scar Memory” novels of Yan Geling.Based on widely collecting research materials and learning from many predecessors' research findings,this paper deeply analyzes the unique features of Yan Geling's “Great Cultural Revolution” novels in the thematic implication,the image-shaping and narrative characteristics,mainly taking advantage of sociology,history,culturology,psychology,comparative literature and using feminist and cross-cultural perspectives.In addition,this paper tries to display the distinct artistic charm of Yan Geling's “Scar Memory” novels,and to seek for the deep psychological motivation of creating her “Scar Memory” novels.The whole paper consists of six parts.The introduction part mainly summarizes the overseas and domestic research status about Yan Geling,the value and meaning of this topic research,the introduction to the main research thought and methods,and particularly emphasizes the uniqueness of Yan Geling's “Scar Memory” novels: her “Scar Memory” novels display the characteristic of distinct time stage and changeable style.Her earlier “Scar Memory” novels focus on describing the distortion and freak that caused by “the Great Cultural Revolution”,and the most noticeable point is that she employs strong feminist consciousness to expose the great damage that “the Great Cultural Revolution”did to the females;while “the Great Cultural Revolution” novels which she wrote after immigration are different,she uses cross-cultural perspective to reconsider that peculiar history stage,so her insight becomes deeper and her thought grows more reasonable,her novels are full of the color of humanism and compassion.The conclusion part summarizes the main idea of this paper,that is to find the uniqueness and contribution of Yan Geling's “Scar Memory” novels in contemporary literature field,and in the meantime talks about some shortcomings of Yan Geling's this kind of novel.The main body of this paper consists of four parts.The first part studies the thematic implication of Yan Geling's “Scar Memory” novels.This paper indicates that her “Scar Memory” novels depict the terrible alienation in that specific historical background,and this is mainly embodied in three aspects: the distortion of mental consciousness,the incompleteness of spiritual emotion and the severe damage of the normal interpersonal relationship.The second part uses the methods of reading the novels carefully and divided the character images into two basic types: one type is the wounded who are affronted and damaged,and the other type is the distorted people who are greatly affected by the society.Then after classification,this part also discusses the same tragic fate of these two types of people.The third part studies the narrative features of Yan Geling's “Scar Memory” novels.There are many novels describe “the Great Cultural Revolution” in literary world,while the value of Yan Geling's novels lies in her remarkable narrative art.This part mainly studies the changeable narrative perspectives and original narrative structure of her “Scar Memory” novels.In the aspect of narrative perspective,Yan Geling mainly adopts children's perspective and female perspective.In the aspect of narrative structure,Yan Geling mainly employs the methods of interlaced narrative and narrative vacancy.The forth part studies the deep psychological motivation of creating these “Scar Memory” novels.This part mainly uses psychology and cross-cultural perspective through studying and finds out the trigger of the earlier domestic “the Great Cultural Revolution” and the influence of the later Oriental and western cultural are both the reasons.Yan Geling's firsthand experience of “the Great Cultural Revolution” directly inspires her creative desire,while her cross-cultural horizon causes her to adopt an objective and calm attitude to reassess “the Great Cultural Revolution” after immigration,so her novels display sagacious and mature style to our readers.