Contradictory pleasure:Eileen Chang, geographical landscape of Shanghai's decade（1943-1952）

• Main Authors: Man-Feng Yang, 楊曼芬
• Other Authors: Kuochen Sung
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/pcj33p

博士 === 世新大學 === 傳播研究所(含博士學位學程) === 101 === This dissertation intends to use the disciplines of cultural research under communication field to explore the crucial decade (1943-1952) of Eileen Chang’s life in Shanghai. Excluding past research of Eileen Chang in Chinese, foreign languages, and comparative literature, this dissertation creates a new perspective to fill the gap in nowadays "Chang Studies." It also uses the existing data aggregation and redefines new values. In regards of the "Chang studies" themes are always related to her life anecdotes, career brocade, articles analysis, text dialectical, love entanglements, and feminism, etc., but we never see any inspection from "postcolonial" and "postfeminist" perspectives. So this study try to use these theories to examine the similarities and differences between Eileen Chang’s reality life and literary creation. Most of known "Chang Studies" emphasized female consciousness between the lines in her novels with relevant descriptions of gender, power, and lust. Their statements always surround the complex relationships between male and female characters, the analyses of various conflicts and contradictions between women, or indications of the various personalities they possess. These statements are extremely vivid, but only limited to figure out Chang’s "written texts strategy." Actually the reality of her life, a new woman's flaunt, is full of contradictions. Chang once commented on a "new woman’s" ambivalence, "Modern woman’s freedom is wanted but needs also traditional woman’s right, it causes the new woman’s tragedy." These words voice the confusion and frustration of this elite woman who lived in a patriarchal society fighting for her independence. This dissertation discusses the dialectic oppositions and contradictions of Chang’s life, explains what kinds of pleasure these contradictions brought her in the war torn era and further, behind the pleasure which kinds of irresolute threats were hidden? Thus this study returns to the historic site in Shanghai to analyze carefully the real Eileen Chang, well known but not yet uncovered Eileen Chang. It aims to redefine this legendary "permanent Eileen Chang" in modern Chinese literature through literary text and real life conflicts, and discover how she got the inexplicable pleasure. First, this study locates Chang in the Old Shanghai's geographical and cultural space and examines her with the U.S. feminist scholar Susan S. Friedman’s meta-criticism theory: "the new geographics of identity." It analyzes Chang’s staggered creation and interpretation of life in her Shanghai days between 1943 and 1952. Finally, reentering the "inner spirit" of her, this study captures a glimpse of her pleasure shelters, exposing the unknown Eileen Chang ever. Keywords: Eileen Chang, the new geographics of identity, postcolonial, postfeminism, cultural geography, psychoanalysis