Life Ritual And Religious Celebration Two Ritual Directions Of Jean Genet's And Gao Xingjian's Dramas

Ritual is so inclusive that we consider it as a ‘great discourse tolerance which is not easy to determine from intension to extension'.A very conclusive and concise method classifies ritual into Sequential Ceremony,Life Ritual and Religious Celebration.It is noticeable that while the French writer Jean Genet shows his extreme attention to the interior of individual lives with The Maids and The Balcony,which indicates the kernel of the life ritual,Gao Xingjian favors religious celebration through his Hell City and The Classic of Mountains and Seas at the end of 1980 s.This thesis is based on the four plays mentioned before,analyzing two kinds of ritual in Jean Genet's and Gao Xingjian's work,also revealing the importance of ritual to the exploration of drama,and dissecting the cultural connotation it carries.There are four parts of the thesis.The first part is ‘The Prologue'.This part carries out the concepts of ritual,Life Ritual and Religious Celebration,explaining and defining the relative academic backgrounds.The summary of research status combs and summarizes current reports about ritual,Jean Genet and Gao Xingjian in sequence.The second part starts with the life ritual in Jean Genet's plays,untangling the comprehensive ritual structure of The Maids and The Balcony,observing the suspension feeling in the play.This feeling is accomplished through "suspension of reality" and "suspension of self-identity".The practice of “Liminality” expresses the “mania” in the play,and shows a very complex emotional administrative levels.Genet's ritual is life ritualwhich has close connections toward human individuals and focuses on the changes of their living states.Based on the specific analysis of Hell City and The Classic of Mountains and Seas,the third part explores the religious celebrations from different perspectives.From the four dimensions of language including lines,background music,fragment presentation and stage practice,this thesis examines the primitive and vital religious ritual forms,and also summarizes the ‘inlay' existence form and linear narrative.This part shows the regain of frankness and sincerity within the plays,as well as the construction of another ritual.On the basis of folk religion and culture,the religious celebration in Gao's plays presents collective,public and extensive characteristics.The fourth part,through analyzing the grafting of ritual and dramas,and examining plays through ritual path,explores the importance of ritual to the development of drama stage.On one hand,life ritual shows its great discovery in drama individuality.It has enabled deeper communication between audiences and the western dramas in some way.On the other hand,the religious celebrations which appears in the decline era of modern Chinese drama has endowed it with a more fundamental and extensive publicity,made the highbrow drama to be friendlier and more tolerant,and broadened the reach of it.At the same time,it is worth noting that,rituals also contain deeper cultural connotations,which reflects the different cultural orientations of Chinese and Western dramas.