| The "Culture Craze" (Wenhuare) of the mid-80's has been drawing continual attention from scholars both inside and outside China. This study focuses on Chinese cultural and literary writings in the period as a political discourse which attempts to dismantle the established communist ideology by critiquing tradition and creating a new aesthetics. With a comparative approach of East-West interactions, I emphasize the participation of Western theories in the Chinese narrative of rebellion while arguing for Chinese writers' innovative application of Western theories according to specific aesthetic and political needs in China. I view Li Zehou as the most important theorist and critic, whose study of Kant, Chinese culture, history, and aesthetics provides a radical new thinking for insurgent writers. But Li is also a contradictory thinker. His "double variations of enlightenment and salvation" and "Western Learning as Principle and Chinese Learning as Application" represent respectively his critical radicalism and conservatism. Having emerged as a challenger to Li, Liu Xiaobo's cultural and political criticism develops Li's radical ideas while negating his conservatism. Su Xiaokang, another critic, publicizes cultural criticism through the medium of television, as an attempt to transform cultural criticism into social action. Sharing the rebellious spirit of cultural criticism, Liu Zaifu's literary subjectivity transplants Li's theory of subjectivity into literary studies and expresses Chinese writers' demand for freedom. My discussion of Huang Ziping in the late 80's reveals a paradox in both his rejecting Roland Barthes' theory of language games as "superficial radicalism" and exploiting it as a tool to expose the communist ideology as myths. The dissertation concludes with a meditation on Chinese writers in exile, focusing on a dilemma they are facing in the West with their memory of a heroic past and their new experience with a highly skeptical academia. |
