| This dissertation traces the changing paradigms through which the Cultural Revolution is depicted in films and television programs during the first decade of China's economic reform. It explores how the post-Cultural Revolution social reformations are rendered intelligible through the representations of the Cultural Revolution as a traumatic historical experience. It is interested in how the mass mediated representations of the Cultural Revolution respond to, interact with, and play a part in institutional, cultural, political formations and transformations in Chinese society during this period.; By reading three media texts in close relationship to their socio-cultural contexts, the dissertation analyzes the shifting designs, understandings and expectations of China's modernization process through the vantage point of studying changing strategies of narrating the Cultural Revolution. The changes in dominant textual strategies are responses to the overriding cultural and institutional fluctuations at different times. Specifically, the continuity of certain literary traditions, the rise of cultural debates over the issue of modernization and the changing configurations of the mass media industry, as local versions of the overall reform, have in various times affected media discourses' relationships with the society, state and cultural processes.; Moreover, the post-Cultural Revolution reflection, to the extent that it was dominated by intellectual utterances, can not but center around the question of re-positioning the intellectual in the newly articulated social totality as a means of formulating and consolidating the hegemonic discourses about reform. It studies not only how historical narratives are constructed, but also how the conditions of the present inform, shape, and accentuate reflective activities and organize them into coherent narratives.; Textual readings of two films---Evening Rains in the Ba Mountain /Bashan Yeyu and King of the Children/ Haizi Wang---and a television drama---Yearning/ Ke Wang---in their respective historical and intellectual contexts are conducted to trace the process of incorporating various social and political discourses into dramatic universes. This is an effort to study and understand the varying textual strategies through which discourses that aspire to (re)organize and guide historical knowledge and interpretation in service of the agendas of modernization are developed under undetermined contingencies and over contested terrains. |
