An analysis on the boundary crossing practice in Ye Si's fiction = Lun Yesi xiao shuo zhong de yue jie shi jian

Abstract

The thesis studies Ye Si’s boundary crossing practice in his fiction. Proposed by Ye Si in the 1980s, “boundary crossing” remains one of the key themes in his literary writing for over forty years. As a novelist, poet, critic and scholar, Ye Si applied his multiple identities to construct a pluralistic narrative. Deeply influenced by Hong Kong’s hybrid culture, he also continued to explore the boundary between literary genres, arts, themes and cultural ideas in his writing, among which fiction was the most significant and consistent genre of his oeuvre. Therefore, this study will focus on Ye Si’s fiction. Different from previous study on Ye Si’s border-crossing practice, which tends to concentrate on that between literature and film, this study offers a comprehensive examination of Ye Si’s boundary crossing practice, including his genre crossing, cross-media experiments, and the evolvement of his notion of “boundary crossing”. Through an in-depth textual analysis and a multi-sourced reading, this study scrutinizes not only Ye Si’s literary notions, writing techniques, perspective on Hong Kong’s culture, but also the impact of Ye Si’s multiple roles on his boundary crossing practice.

The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One provides a historical overview of various Hong Kong authors’ border-crossing writing. It also discusses Hong Kong’s postmodern culture that inspired Ye Si’s boundary crossing practice, as well as the characteristics of such practice. Chapter Two discusses how Ye Si challenged the boundary of literary genre through his fiction Kuangcheng Luanma, a work whose authorship was claimed only after Ye Si’s death but serves as a salient example of Ye Si’s crossing the genre between fiction and cultural commentaries. Chapter Three focuses on Ye Si’s boundary crossing between fiction and film. Through an examination of Ye Si’s role as a film critic and a film scholar, this chapter elaborates his methods of integrating the techniques, aesthetics, themes into his fiction, as well as the interaction between his film studies and late fiction. Chapter Four analyzes the theme of boundary crossing and its multiple meanings in Ye Si’s fiction from the 1970s to the 21th century. Chapter Five, the conclusion chapter, summarizes the features and the limits of Ye Si’s boundary crossing practice in his fiction, pointing out the significance of his practice and its implications for both Hong Kong literature and Hong Kong’s postmodern culture.