| Summary: | 碩士 === 國立臺灣藝術大學 === 戲劇與劇場應用學系 === 98 === In 2000, Taiwanese government experienced its first party alternation; at the same time, the public has begun to “grade” people into different generations when referring to one’s cultural identity. Coresponsively, recent modern theater has been discussing the “gap between generations” and the problem of “successor” when alluding to the disparity between generations in theatrical culture. However, though the problem between different generations has been mentioned, no precise discourse was ever made. On the opposite, most writings, especially those created by the “upper” generation targeting the youngsters, tend to oversimplify the new generation’s cultural identity with certain bias originated from their superior social and power status. Yet most youngsters, being “stereotyped”, have chosen to response with silence, thus continued to be formalized into a stiff stereotype. This discourse delineates the young generation with self-inspection, and through the sought of self-definition in the theatrical culture, the author aims to analyze the present.
This thesis takes Karl Manheim’s theory of generations and Stuart Hall’s theory of cultural representation of text as basic references, considering “generation” a social location in a particular social process. Regarding theater as a medium, this thesis analyzes how the young generation has represented and practiced their cultural identify. Manheim has pointed out that generation is constructed by certain social process, instead of being marked out by ages. The author of this discourse takes the lifting of martial law as a distinction of social process, defining himself as specific “seventh grade” generation being raised in the society after the lifting of martial law, and has participated in the party alternation of year 2000. By analyzing how the specific generation has represented and realized their cultural identify, the movements of certain social process and the self-explanation of their cultural identity can be shown. Furthermore, since representation is structured by reciprocal language system, and the representation of text is related with the power relationship between the “encoders” and “decoders”, we can thus realize the seesaw struggle between “hegemony” and “counter- hegemony” in the field of hegemonic cultural.
Therefore, the author studies Fable to be, or not to be as a case of the representation and signifying practice to analyze how the members of the “seventh grade” has refused or negotiated with the dominant-hegemonic ideology. When they reveal how the dominant-hegemonic ideology has intended to rule the decoders and to dominate the meanings, they have started to decode and negotiate with the present meaning structure. As a result of this response to the hegemony, the meanings have started to flow and grow, composing the process of cultural identification. When the action of refusing provides people the imagination of transforming the old order and meanings, people can transform from passive message receivers to positive meaning producers. Since refusal and disparity both exist between the interaction of meanings, the process of negotiation and identification is a process that never ends. After the analysis of text, we found out that the dominant-hegemonic ideology that the “seventh grade” people face has been trying to rule over the subordinate without proper innovation. Therefore, the author holds that the continuance of refusal and interactions of meanings along with “re-refusing” the hegemony would help the process of cultural representation and signifying practice when using theater as a method.
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