An Ontological Research Of Network Literature

Network literature is a kind of literature, which exits and spreads through the medium of the computer and internet. Whether this brand-new form of literature, which rose abruptly with modern digital technology, can form part of a literary ring with its unique form in the aesthetic semantic chain of human history or make a paradigm shift by the change of media in the literary aesthetic context, is a significant topic in the 21st-century literary map and a literary motif which looks forward to legitimacy identification. This thesis tries to explore this new topic through an ontological approach.Ontology is the theory of existence. It inquires into such problems as the existential form of the origin and nature of things (including nature, society and human being), and their formation and evolution, and the problem of the ultimate existence of essential meaning. By drawing on the ontological quest pattern of "existence existing before essence" and adopting the phenomenological method of "returning to the object itself, the present investigation focuses on such questions as "how to exist" and "why it should exist" about network literature. Having chosen the overall strategy from "the way of existence" to "the essence of existence," the thesis tries to explore the way of existence with the phenomenological method and to explore the essence of existence with the theory of value, that is, to inquire into its value noumenon by its phenomenon noumenon and finally provide answers to the questions about the form and significance of the existence of network literature. These two aspects of existence are called inthis thesis respectively "overt existence" and "covert existence" of the noumena of network literature. Lastly the question "why it should exist" is reconsidered, in order to go from the "thesis" and "antithesis" to the "synthesis" of theoretical logic. The thesis extends the ontological analysis of network literature from the analysis of its form and value to that of its artistic possibilities, and thinks about the aesthetic construction and ontological artistic tendency, and try to give an artistic and philosophical name to network literature as a kind of literary form, so as to explore the possibility of setting up a theoretical pattern of network literature. Through this overall planning, the present study attempts to make original contributions to the field.The former part of the dissertation focuses on the way of existence of network literature, with the aim of clarifying the overt structure of its ontological existence. This overt structure has several inter-related logic aspects:(1) Media Pattern: the technological whirl of digital carrier. The primary existence of network literature lies in its technological media, that is, with digital technology as media carrier, the existence of "network" brings about the existence of "literature". "The forth media" transformation brought about by network technology makes it possible for literature to create for itself an electronic ecological space out of the technological whirl of communications revolution, and then produce the poetics of the literary and technical aesthetics of network sign discourse.(2) Bit Narration: the language dimension of the catenation text. The network's "bit" language narration is a special expression of literature. Its special way of referring, the coding and decoding dependent on electronic machine language, breaks off the daily experiences, and yet the technology of exchange and catenation creates free spaces for multimedia, hypertext narration of network electronic texts.(3) Desire Rhetoric: the lonely carnival of the inter-subjectivity. The essential motif of network writing is usually the expression of the inter-subjectivity's exchange desire. The carnival that people in town celebrate by "vulgarity show" on the electronic grazing land, gets rid of the "mask anxiety" in the living world and creates a free, equal, real, and sensual "boast" model and "the desire rhetoric" of the body.(4) Wandering Online: the virtual reality of the cyber...