| This dissertation examines the reception of reclusion and encounter with the foreign in Cao Xuegin's The Story of the Stone , Wu Jianren's The New Story of the Stone, and Yu Dafu's "Sinking" and "Journey to the South." The three parts of the dissertation are each devoted to one author and comprise two interrelated chapters on reclusion and subject formation. The first chapter in each part discusses the intertexts. The second chapter analyzes how the protagonists' receptions of these texts define their subjectivities at crucial moments of their life journeys. Chapter One, "From Lament to Solitude: Subject Formation of the Marginalized Literati," argues that reclusion is an alternative to exile in the literati's answer to the Confucian dilemma about service and reclusion. Writings in both poetic traditions have led to the socialization of marginalized literati. Chapter Two, "Jia Baoyu's Winding Path to Solitude," traces how Baoyu's writings subvert the conventional practice of literati community formations, which prepares his exit from the world. Chapter Three, "The Newspaper and the Novel: Anti-Reclusion, Transformed Reclusion and the Subject Formation of the New Citizen," analyzes the transition from anti-reclusion to transformed reclusion in Liang Qichao's discourse of the nation and the intellectual as an engaged citizen in articles mostly published in the newspapers read by Wu Jianren's protagonist, Jia Baoyu. Identifying the same transition in Wu's novel, Chapter Four argues that Wu's reception of The Story of the Stone constitutes his dialogue with Liang's theory. Chapter Five, "Romantic Solitude and the Formation of European Subjects," traces affirmation of the redemptive function of poetry and aestheticization of the foreign as two European forms of solitude and subject formation. Chapter Six, "Chinese Reclusion, Exile and Romantic Solitude: the End of the Poetic Subjectivity," discusses resistance to and assimilations of Romantic solitude by classical Chinese poets in modern China and their respective nationalist and cosmopolitan subjectivities. These narratives create a trajectory of the Chinese literati's transition from dynastic subjects to national subjects. |
