中国大陆、台湾新生代作家历史创伤记忆研究

Abstract

The New Generation Writers in the 1980s and 1990s drew great attention of the Chinese mainland and Taiwan literary circles for its anti-traditional, anti-mainstream subversion and its deconstructive narrative way. As the generation born in the 1950s and 1960s, New Generation Writers’ memories of childhood and adolescence were full of traumatic experiences and were also full of variety by the differences between Chinese mainland and Taiwan in time and space backgrounds, ideology, and cultural contexts. New Generation writers on Chinese mainland were mostly born in the 1960s. Their childhood and adolescence coincided with the Cultural Revolution. So the tyranny, violence and patriarchy at that time has caused tremendous trauma to their physical and mental health. To alleviate the personal historical traumas, these writers started writing their traumatic memories about Cultural Revolution in the eyes of children. The writers revealed the soul trauma caused by the violence in cultural revolution and the ridiculous, deformed patriarchy and an ugly, wretched father in a child's growth. In this way, expressed their deep thoughts of humanity, questioned toward patriarchy and rebelled against those ugly father images. The New Generation Writers in Taiwan were mostly born in the 1950s. Their memories of childhood and adolescence bore an evident provincial or ethnic imprint. Local Taiwanese writers generally presented the physical and mental trauma of Taiwanese impacted by February 28 Incident and the Political Terror in the 1950s.Immigrant writers in Taiwan were inclined to write based on their living experiences in military communities to reveal the rootless anxiety and spiritual trauma caused by identity loss, which has triggered serious reflection over origin problems and group conflicts. New Generation Writers from Chinese mainland and Taiwan deconstructed the dominance of official grand history, formed a new traumatic historical narrative way, and displayed an alternative traumatic historical reality in a personal way. This personal interpretation of history has revealed the traumatic historical awareness of the writers and their thinking on the traumatic characteristics of history, which in a sense realized the reflection and transcendence of individuals to history and also brought new perspective for people to interpret history.