Abstract

This dissertation is a study in hermeneutic phenomenology that attempts to register the changes in cultural assumptions that have occurred in Chinese critical realism since the May Fourth period. It problematizes the referential transparency of realism by pointing out the sedimented context of the Chinese Enlightenment, in which the realists negotiated traditional Chinese humanism by means of a number of dominant Western social and political discourses. ;Thus, Lu Xun's The True Story of Ah Q is a self-representation and interrogation of the Chinese people as underevolved cannibals; it is mediated through the author's knowledge of Social Darwinism and Christian humanism. Ba Jin's Family is a representation of the traditional family as a suffocating prisonhouse, which is filtered through the author's acquaintance with Western individualism and Russian anarchism. The representation of Chinese society in Mao Dun's Midnight as ready for a Bolshevic revolution is mediated through the author's knowledge of Marx's economic theory and political thought. And Lao She's Camel Xiangzi which depicts man as hopelessly struggling against his inner drives as well as the external forces of nature, is mediated through the author's familiarity with French naturalism. ;In the light of the present-day understanding of colonialist discourse as a form of appropriating non-Western cultures, Chinese realism seems to be a failed struggle to mediate reality with a broader structuring principle of history, since the May Fourth generation of realist writers ended up by opting for a Western progressive notion of civilization