Landscape of lost and found : nature in Shen Congwen’s and Gao Xingjian’s writings

Abstract

This dissertation conducts a comparative study between Shen Congwen’s and Gao Xingjian’s literary representations of nature. The inspiration comes from the two writers’ commonalities in life trajectories and literary creations. To illustrate, their self-exile into the southern frontier and obsession with nature demonstrate a clear intention to detach from the established political system. Despite certain scholarly attention, in-depth comparative studies on these two writers are still yet to come. My dissertation thus seeks to fill in the existing gap. Situated in the discourse of ecocriticism, my dissertation draws theoretical references from ecofeminism, environmental phenomenology and Lawrence Buell’s concept of place-connectedness. Accordingly, this comparative study revolves around three interrelated focuses, namely, the motifs of gender representation, bodily experience and platial attachment in Shen’s and Gao’s works. Infused with the dualisms of male/female, mind/body and city/country, these three focuses all feed into the fundamental dichotomy between human and non-human, between culture and nature. In this sense, my study aims at investigating how Shen and Gao deal with these intersectionalities similarly and differently in their representations of nature. The conclusion is: while Shen’s texts bear much complexity and ambiguity from struggling with these dualisms, Gao’s works send clearer messages by transcending these dualisms and redefining the human-nature relationship. By bringing Shen Congwen and Gao Xingjian into ecocritical studies, this dissertation seeks to excavate rich ecological resources embedded in Chinese literature and, hopefully, to form thought-provoking dialogues both within and beyond the discourse of Chinese ecocriticism.