THESIS
2012
xvii, 198 p. : ill. ; 30 cm
Abstract
This thesis focuses on comical literature in 1940s Shanghai and inquires into the complicated structure of feeling in historical trauma by investigating how different communities and groups of writers in occupied Shanghai employed various laughter inducing strategies, and articulated their own comic visions as responses to the reality of war. I argue as a discursive practice, the laughter produced a driving force to regenerate literary traditions in a wartime city and constructed an alternative aesthetics to mainstream discourses of cultural production and critique, which emphasized mimetic representation and the literary mode of tragedy-realism....[
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This thesis focuses on comical literature in 1940s Shanghai and inquires into the complicated structure of feeling in historical trauma by investigating how different communities and groups of writers in occupied Shanghai employed various laughter inducing strategies, and articulated their own comic visions as responses to the reality of war. I argue as a discursive practice, the laughter produced a driving force to regenerate literary traditions in a wartime city and constructed an alternative aesthetics to mainstream discourses of cultural production and critique, which emphasized mimetic representation and the literary mode of tragedy-realism.
Chapter One illustrates the theoretical and methodological meaning of studying comedy as a problematic literary strategy with a brief look into the discipline of laughter in the mainstream discourses of cultural production and critique since early twenty-century China. Chapter Two surveys popular print cultures which open a cultural space of entertainment as an intended way to preserve the city’s civilization and construct cultural identity under the war circumstance, exemplified by Ping Jinya and Xu zhuo’ai’s comic imagination. Chapter Three goes further and discusses Eileen Chang’s comedies and investigates how she develops the popular comic tradition and creates a grotesque world of modern ruin. Chapter Four looks into the adjustive discourse of comedy in the “movement of spoken drama”. Chapter Five analyzes the comical dramas of Shi Huafu, Li Jianwu and Yang Jiang, and investigates how they negotiate the resistance discourse, city entertainment and individual literary and aesthetic pursuits, and thus rethink the complicated relations and representations of nationalism, gender relations and capitalism. It is concluded that the laughter in the war not only opened a cultural space of resistance, cultural identity and critique of cultural reality but also created a field full of aesthetic and ideological contention.
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