THESIS
2002
Abstract
According to Linda Hutcheon, Postmodernism is a site of subversion. It challenges the notion of center, contests the homogeneous values of the ontological and epistemolgical systems, for instance, history, sujectiveity as well as the increasing uniformation of the mass culture. Postmodernism emphasizes heterogeneity and contradictions and believes they have the subversive power in disintegrating binary opposition that conceals hierarchies. No attempts have been made by postmodernism to move the marginal to the center or reverse the positionings of the two value systems. It tends to place itself on the borderline of the two ---a paradoxical doubleness position that makes it swaying between the center and the peripheries. The ambiguous positioning (plurity) of Postmodernism is not a sign...[
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According to Linda Hutcheon, Postmodernism is a site of subversion. It challenges the notion of center, contests the homogeneous values of the ontological and epistemolgical systems, for instance, history, sujectiveity as well as the increasing uniformation of the mass culture. Postmodernism emphasizes heterogeneity and contradictions and believes they have the subversive power in disintegrating binary opposition that conceals hierarchies. No attempts have been made by postmodernism to move the marginal to the center or reverse the positionings of the two value systems. It tends to place itself on the borderline of the two ---a paradoxical doubleness position that makes it swaying between the center and the peripheries. The ambiguous positioning (plurity) of Postmodernism is not a sign of uncertainty or undecisiveness in making a judgement but is a strategy to question the definite, coherent and fixed values of the center. Jean Baudrillard points out that the object can subvert the dominant subject by the notion of seduction which reverses the power relations of the two parties temporarily. This tactics blurr the demarcation of object and subject and, in fact, postmodernism uses the same strategy for subversion. If we consider postmodernism negatively and regarded it as an element that disintegrates order and coherence, it is due to our disregard of its subversive intention.
In Wong Bik Wan’s fiction, it is not difficult to find the ambiguous and contradictary elements that characterized postmodernism. No matter it is in the aspects of pleasure, historical writing and writing styles employed by Wong Bik Wan, one can find the traces of the postmodernist poetics of ambivalence. This thesis attempts to review the subversive use of this kind of postmodernist strategy in Wong Bik Wan’s fiction.
The Introduction is an overview, that gives a brief account of the subversiveness of Wong Bik Wan’s fiction. Chapter one focuses first on the analysis of sensuous pleasure and the elements of death, eroticism and violence in Wong Bik Wan’s fictions which make women’s predicament the spectacle of the audience, then elaborates in what sense Wong’s fiction subvert the imbalance power relation between men and women and disintegrates these binary oppositions. Chapter two discusses the representation of history in Wong’s fiction and analyzes how she integrates the ideas of postmodernism and postcolonialism to reconstruct history by blurring the notion of fiction and truth. Chapter three analyzes Wong Bik Wan’s postmodernist style of writing that aims at asserting differences and contradiction. The last chapter concludes with an assessment of ambiguities in Wong Bik Wan’s fiction as the source of subversion.
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