Bie-modern Studies Achieves Another Landmark: Chang Jun Completes and Defends 135,000-words PhD Thesis on Bie-modern Studies

On May 22, Chang Jun, a doctoral student supervised by Prof. Wang Jianjiang of Shanghai Normal University, participated in the doctoral dissertation defense of his 135,000-words dissertation entitled “A Study of Hybrid Dystopian Novels in Bie-modern Perspective”. The head of the defense team was Prof. Zeng Jun from Shanghai University, and the members of the defense team were Prof. Han Zhenjiang from Shanghai Jiaotong University, Prof. Tang Yonghua from East China Normal University, and Profs. Chen Wei and Li Dan from Shanghai Normal University. During the defense meeting, the five experts unanimously affirmed the innovation and academic value of the dissertation and gave the dissertation pertinent and valuable opinions, and finally, the dissertation was unanimously agreed to pass the defense by the vote of the experts of the defense team.

The novels of contemporary Chinese writers with absurd consciousness present the absurd structural function and absurd aesthetic characteristics of modern, pre-modern and post-modern hybrid collage. This thesis studies the structural function and aesthetic characteristics of this hybrid absurdity from the perspective of Bie-modernism’s theory of temporal spatialization. The theory of temporal spatialization encapsulates the hybridization and entanglement of modernity, premodernity and postmodernity, with spatial juxtaposition replacing epochal progress, and expresses the phenomenon of the co-temporal state of modernity, premodernity and postmodernity in social, aesthetic and literary forms, in contrast to the Western ephemeral state of going from premodernity to modernity and then from modernity to postmodernity and even post-postmodernity. The novels with absurd consciousness created by Mo Yan, Yan Lianke, Liu Zhenyun, Wang Xiaobo, and Li Er are more innovative in content and form than the absurd novels of Zong Pu, Wang Meng, Chen Rong, and Liu Sola in the early 1980s and those of Ma Yuan, Remnant Snow, and Ge Fei in the mid-1980s in China, and they have formed an aesthetic style of the absurd that has Chinese national characteristics and local features. They return to the Chinese folk culture tradition of the grotesque, draw nutrients from folk art, and draw on modern grotesque expression techniques and post-modern ideas and spirits, forming a modern, pre-modern and post-modern hybrid and juxtaposition of the grotesque structure and aesthetic form, so there is an obvious historical stage and a mixture of ideological content and artistic techniques. Compared with the Western twentieth-century absurd narratives, this hybridity of historical stage and ideological content also has significantly different characteristics of the era and aesthetic features. This thesis is divided into five main parts. The introductory part poses the problem, introduces an overview of the study, clarifies the significance of this study and explains the methodology and innovation of this study. The first chapter is the organization and definition of concepts, which is divided into two aspects. One is to elaborate the theory of absurdity from the perspectives of philosophical categories, aesthetic forms, and absurd narratives. The second is to introduce Bie-modernism’s theory of temporal spatialization, including the temporal spatialization of social forms, the temporal spatialization of aesthetic forms, the temporal spatialization of literary narratives, and the difference between Bie-modernism’s theory of temporal spatialization and the Western theory of socio-spatial theory and the Western theory of spatial narratology. Chapter 2 discusses the structural function of Chinese hybridized absurdity, focusing on three main aspects. The first is the inheritance, deconstruction and reconstruction of pre-modern folk grotesque culture. For example, the dystopian novels of Mo Yan, Yan Lianke, Liu Zhenyun, Wang Xiaobo, Li Er and others have inherited China’s pre-modern folk dystopian culture, such as pre-modern folk ghost narratives, myths and legends, historical sagas, and fables, etc., and incorporated modern spirit and modern vision, which, through the deconstruction of post-modern artistic methods, have formed the miscellanea of absurdity with China’s national characteristics and local features. Secondly, the mixing of pre-modern, modern and post-modern has led to the barbaric growth of absurdity. The collage and reorganization of modern and pre-modern forms several dystopian forms, such as the collage of pre-modern and modern historical space, the intertextualization of two or more parallel fields, and the mixing of pre-modern vernacular society, modern and post-modern society, etc. The mixing of absurdity with post-modern art techniques has formed a dystopia with Chinese national and local characteristics. The hybrid dystopia incorporates the deconstructive ideas and various artistic techniques of postmodernism, breaking the traditional historical narrative of linear order and combining them, and showing a variety of dystopian interpretations of pre-modern historical time and space. Thirdly, it is a postmodern ironic and ecstatic critique of the pre-modern era. With the help of modern absurd, deformed and magical literary forms, the hybrid dystopia shows the dystopian scenes of modern, pre-modern and post-modern realities, and expresses the criticism of pre-modern ideology and concepts, including pre-modern ideology of officialdom, sense of power, patriarchal concepts, and the superiority of men over women in the post-modern ironic and ecstatic form of art. Chapter 3 summarizes and outlines the aesthetic characteristics of Chinese miscellaneous absurdity, which are summarized into three features. First, the aesthetic characteristics of multi-flavors and strange flavors, strangeness and bizarre. This includes the aesthetic features of multi-flavors and strange flavors after the juxtaposition of ideas, cultures, languages, and artistic techniques, and the sense of strangeness and bizarreness brought about by recreating time and space in the cycle of reincarnation. Secondly, the aesthetic features of grotesque and music are intertwined. It includes the interweaving of the grotesque with the sense of fun and folklore, and the interweaving of the grotesque with games. Thirdly, the aesthetic characteristics of the interweaving of the grotesque and the real are also real and have the flavor of earth. This includes the aesthetic characteristics of the absurd writing in the intertwining and entangling of the real and historical truths, which generates the aesthetic characteristic of creating a broken circle, and the aesthetic characteristic of the earthy flavor constituted by the multiple contradictory relationships. Chapter 4 analyzes the reasons for the formation of Chinese hybrid absurdity. It mainly discusses three aspects. First, the influence of social form on the structure of dystopia. The structure of modern, pre-modern and post-modern social and aesthetic forms has led to the historical stage of contradictory conflicts and harmonious complicity among modern, pre-modern and post-modern, and has become the basis for the formation of Chinese hybrid dystopia. Secondly, the continuation of the traditional Chinese spirit of pragmatic rationality and the Chineseization of Western absurdity. The influence of the traditional spirit of pragmatism and rationality and the grafting of inherited folk culture with modern absurd forms form the ideological content and expression methods of Chinese hybrid absurd literature. Thirdly, modern dystopian techniques are blended with pre-modern music culture and post-modern thinking. Chinese hybrid dystopia presents a hybrid absurd aesthetic characteristic that is different from that of Western dystopian literature, in which the grotesque and pleasure are intertwined. The reason for this lies in the inheritance of the pre-modern pleasure culture and tradition of fun, as well as the combination of modern dystopian expression methods and post-modernist ideas, which forms a Chinese absurdity that is characterized by both ethnicity and the times.