| Gao Changhong,the backbone of Kuangbiaoshe and Mangyuanshe,played an important role on the cultural stage in 1920’s China.Due to his respective conflicts with Lu Xun and Mao Zedong and worsened up by his disagreeable personality and obscure style,Gao’s name remained in shadow for a long time.This dissertation attempts to shed light on Gao’s life and work and to reclaims this once-well-known figure in modern Chinese literary and cultural history.Adopting Will Writing,a concept borrowed from Nietzsche ’s Will Power,as the key to understanding Gao’s work and world,this dissertation argues that Gao’s literary creation can be best interpreted by five closely connected images:the Madman,the Su.penrman,the Strongman,the Individual and the Sick Man.Chronologically,Gao started his Will Writing as the Madman,who was both mad the painful.Though the Madman achieved himself by means of Wandering and Talking Nonsense,he was collapsed by the collaboration of the Philistine and Power.The Superman was strong,optimistic and radical,and found his way out in National Life,which was in accordance with Gao’s national enlightenment and salvation ideal.The Strongman dared to say no to All Authority and achieved himself by sneering at the Authority.A typical early modern Chinese intellectual,the Individual showed Gao’s never-relenting independence.However,"poverty and road","sickness and dream"and "death and ghost",or the three major motifs encountered by the Sick Man showed that how the writer pointed an aimless way for his light-seeking protagonists.Combining different approaches and methods from different fields as philosophical,historical,psychological,literary and cultural studies,this dissertation attempts to set up a dynamic and multi-dimensional mode to interpret Gao’s works with Will Writing as the core and the Madman,the Superman,the Strongman,the Individual,and the Sick Man as five different aspects,simultaneously rediscovering and reevaluating both Gao Changhong’ s life and work in a fresh and inspiring way. |
