“新时期”的“个人”主体想象與现代主义

Abstract

With the end of the Cultural Revolution, the literary circle in China staged heated discussions on humanism and western modernism. In this new period, modernization became the grand national purpose and modernism, which had been disregarded during the 1950s through the 1970s, was newly accepted as an indispensable resource for modernization of Chinese literature as it showed “new” and “advanced” literary imagery. In this context, so called “Chinese modernist'”works finally appeared in 1985 and this seemed to prove that China had the ability to do what the western society had achieved in the literary field. In fact, the significance of Chinese modernist novels lied in the inter-textuality which read them as “modernist”, rather than in their modernity itself. In other words, they became “modernist” works because of the Chinese imagination and translation of the western modernism. This study investigates the history and context in which the Chinese contemporary literature translated the western modernism and understood its "individual" subjects. Exploring discussions about Sartre's existentialism and his literary works in the New Era is especially useful to this end, because they exerted a strong influence on the Chinese modernism. Then this study analyses the birth process of Chinese modernism by detailed reading of several texts produced in 1985. Through this analysis, we can understand what interior and exterior factors were, which took the lead in literary writing in the mid-1980s, and what literary subject they worked to build under the grand national strategy of “marching toward the world(走向世界)”.