Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

The Emergence of the Modern Chinese Narrator: Studies of Lu Xun, Shi Zhecun, Sun Li, and Wang Zengqi

by Tao Peng

In this dissertation, I examine the short stories written by four modern Chinese stylists whose works, I argue, represent the crucial transformation of Chinese writing in the twentieth century. Traditionally, most scholarship on the modernization of Chinese fiction has focused on the social-historical determinants found in the stories’ narrative structures. I argue, however, that a narrative analysis independent of language cannot tell the difference of the voices sent out by different subjects in a story. Only through a linguistic analysis, then, can we conduct a reliable narrative analysis. I argue that Lu Xun, Shi Zhecun, Sun Li, and Wang Zengqi form a historical continuum of Foucault’s discursive struggle, which maps out the route of modernization of Chinese writing in the twentieth century. In these authors’ works, I examine the varying distances among author, narrator, and characters through the subtle differences in their voices. While the concept of distance among these voices hearkens to western narratives, we cannot convincingly define the Chinese narratives as “modern” simply because they include western narrative techniques. What makes Lu Xun, Shi Zhecun, Sun Li, and Wang Zengqi pioneers of modern Chinese fiction is their creation of a new and distinctively Chinese style, inspired by western literature, through language. Their writing creates a Chinese narrative style whose essence relies on the linguistic elements of classical written Chinese and contemporary spoken dialects. The modernization of Chinese fiction cannot be simply regarded as a process of Westernization because Chinese language demands Western narrative techniques being Sinicized at the same time.