Reconfiguring Chinese modernism: The poetics of temporality in 1940s fiction and poetry.

摘要

This dissertation aims at delineating the reconfiguration of modernism in China during the war and ideology-ridden years through the examination of the notions of temporality and the implied spatial logic in the works of Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets represented by Yuan Kejia and Mu Dan. Modernist sensibility in the West can be located in the very conception of time. Modernism's preoccupation with formal experimentation, its depiction of the modern experience as being disoriented and fragmented, its pursuit of a certain aesthetics that is independent of material reality, and its distrust in the external world and preference for the inward exploration of the mind, are closely related to the cultural crisis brought out by the disillusionment with the once firmly held belief in linear temporality. The works of the modernist writers during the war years in China reflect a similar sense of disillusionment. Therefore, through the examination of notions of temporality represented in the works of these Chinese modernist writers, I argue that Chinese modernism at this particular historical juncture should be seen as an effort that resists the literary and political demands of the time, and interacts with its Western counterparts on a global level.;In response to the devastating conditions of war, social instability, and the wartime experience of displacement, anxiety and despair, Feng Zhi, Shen Congwen, and the Nine Leaves Poets express in their writing a heightened awareness of time. Exploring particularly the ways in which the temporal notion of the moment, and the temporal orders of past, present and future are represented in their texts, I argue that these Chinese modernist writers in the 1940s express in their works a preference for non-linearity, spatial form, as well as psychological exploration. Their works also reflect a shared contemplation of existential concerns, manifested in metaphysical inquiries, searches for the possibility of transcendence, self-reflexivity, and a rethinking of the relationship between individual and society.