Jacob Long

Date of Award

2012

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Zhu, Aijun

Keywords

Chinese Literature, Subjectivity, Avant-garde

Area of Concentration

Chinese Language and Culture

Abstract

This thesis concerns male subjectivity as it is treated in the fiction of Yu Hua. In the first instance, its purpose is to reevaluate how male subjectivity is to be understood in Yu Hua's early avant-garde short stories in light of his later realist novels. It is divided into an introduction, including connotations and implications of (male)subjectivity in modern China, as well as a brief summary of intellectual and literary trends of the 1980s in China, and then two chapters of analysis, and a conclusion. The first chapter is an analysis of Yu Hua's short story "Blood and Plum Blossoms". Lacanian psychoanalytic techniques are used to critically evaluate the psychology of Yu Hua's male protagonist and discover what renders him incapable of subjective agency. What the analysis will reveal is how the central most impediment to male subjectivity is a traditional patriarchal familial structure that renders male subjectivity an impossibility unless the male subject should engage in the same logic of oppression used against it. In the second chapter, an analysis of Yu Hua's realist novel, Chronicle of a Blood Merchant, is done that looks at how Yu Hua creates a new male protagonist. This character's familial ontology and history will be shown to have been fundamentally rewritten and enable a new male subjectivity to be formed based on the male subject's egalitarian engagement with his family. A modified Oedipal complex that Chen Jianguo articulates as the Symbolic order that operates in "World like Mist," will be refuted in place of new phallic signifiers that engender an anti-oppressive familial structure.

Rights

This bibliographic record is available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication. The New College of Florida, as creator of this bibliographic record, has waived all rights to it worldwide under copyright law, including all related and neighboring rights, to the extent allowed by law.

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