Literary Writing Of Disease And Modern Subject

In The Birth of Clinic,Foucault ascribed the emergence of modern clinic to the Enlightenment spirit which objectified human itself as the source of cognitive knowledge.This trend also revealed itself in the lyrical style of literature centered on the topic of disease and death in the nineteenth century.The transformations of clinic and literature field in the nineteenth century shared the same logical basis:admitting the mortality and finiteness of human being.This logical basis also acts as a significant condition of forming modern subject.In the beginning of the twentieth century,as the introducing of the Western modernity,China has also been influenced by the Enlightenment movement once changed the features of clinic and literary field in the nineteenth century Europe.The modern Western clinic changed the way how traditional Chinese people imagined the relationship between heaven and human,body and soul,from a metaphysical thinking pattern to a scientific one.At the same time,the literary writing of disease had an explosive growth,which not only reflects the crisis of nation-state,but also different predicaments of individual subject in different historical periods.Therefore,the analysis of literary writing of disease in the twentieth century can be a key to a better understanding of the history of modern individual subject of China.As we know,subject is not a fixed conception,its features changes when the cultural context changes.In order to depict modern individual subject thoroughly,we designed three cultural contexts.In the first context,the love and gender field,we found that the connotations of modern individual subject have changed roughly three times,from pre-modern romantic love to modem Enlightenment rationality to the postmodernism irrationality,and the literary writing of disease respectively reflects the depression of romantic love,the split of body of soul,and the de-personalization of the post-industrial society.In the context of modern urbanization,we can see that literary wiring reflects the failure of individual who wants to construct its subject through participating the Western urban modernity in the 1930s’ New sensationalists’fiction,and the confusion of individual who wants to build its subject through satisfactions of desire in the narration of urbanization in the Post-New-Era novels in the 1990s.In the daily-life context,we discovered that the disappearance of subject in the 1990s’ New Realism fiction should be attributed to the concealing of the fear of death which reveal the originality of existence,and the literary writing of disease in these works has lost its metaphysical features and being transformed into one of the daily trifles.In some other New Realism works,job become a possible way for individuals’ self-transcendence.However,the process of forming a professional subject can be impeded by the material desire provoked by the consumiption society time after time,and literary writing of disease in these works accordingly reflects the moral dilemma of individual.Finally,in Yan Lianke’s literary writing of disease,the continuousness of daily-life has been used as a strategy to combat disease and death,from which the writer constructed an existentialism subject.Modern subject is a cultural strategy designed for the transcendence of human mortality.From the history of Chinese modern individual subject and the literary writing of disease,we can see that almost all the cultural designs showed their own finiteness in different historical periods and cultural contexts.However,finiteness just proved the deepest vocation of modernity:the constitutive sense of creation through rupture and crisis.Modernity is still uncompleted.