Fiction contra Historiography: New Dimensions in the Works of Guo Songfen

• Main Authors: Ting-Er Chen, 陳鼎貳
• Other Authors: Duncan McColl Chesney
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2019
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/z2bj97

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 外國語文學研究所 === 107 === Abstract This thesis expects to achieve three goals: first, I aim to critique the ideology consolidated by Taiwan literary historiography and the limits it has set on the vision, methodology and political dimension of the discipline; second, from new perspectives I try to locate dimensions that have not been considered or discussed in details in Guo Songfen’s works; third, I view my reading of Guo’s works as an experiment to measure the possibility of conducting comparative works with Western tradition in Taiwan literature. I refer to Western Marxist aesthetic as the methodological paradigm, and I wish to unearth the historical and epistemological significance in literary forms on the basis of close reading. In the introduction I argue that Taiwan literary historiographies establish the utopian telos of Taiwan literature according to two principles: “will to resist” and “demand for authenticity.” The first chapter follows the argument developed in the introduction and illustrates that the ideology is actually based on aesthetic and epistemological premises of realism and modernism, and I strive to find proof for the inherent interrelation within their ostensible antagonism. In chapter two I revisit modern Japanese intellectual history to tease out the immanent dialectic in its contact with Western modernity, and I observe how this dialectic is reflected in modern literary criticism and problematizes the narrative perspective in prose fiction. I use what I find to read a critical scene in Guo’s novel Jinghun. In the third chapter I study the possible influence of Flaubertian aesthetic on Guo’s stories “Moon Seal,” “Wailing Moon,” and “Snow Blind,” demonstrating how Guo uses rhetorical techniques such as displaced object, irony, narrative uncertainty and useless aestheticization to negatively challenge the affirmative reflective relation between fiction and history. In chapter four I research the late style and imagery in Guo’s “Brightly Shine the Stars Tonight” from three angles: historical fiction, politics of temporalities, and mythical method, so as to criticize the well-accepted “redemption hypothesis” in previous studies and to illustrate how Guo’s late style touches upon the remnant of Republic of China in Taiwan-centered literary historiography. In the epilogue I contextualize my thesis in two axes: “tradition” and “the world,” and propose my advice for the future of Taiwan literature. There are two additional excursuses: one stresses the inherent formal limits in the common sense theorization and application of “imagined communities” and suggests a more dialectical version of nationalism from Western Marxism; the other reads Guo’s story “Clover” from the presence of Hegel and the absence of Marx and Engels to explain Guo’s definitive turn from political activity to literature from the story’s philosophical aspect and narrative problem.