| William Faulkner, a winner of 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature and the 1954 Pulitzer Prize, is one of the greatest modern writers in the 20th in America. He is acknowledged as a representative of American Southern literature. His novels not only probe into the root of the deconstruction of Southern America, but also explore the insistent problems of human consciousness. His experimentations on writing techniques such as the handling of narrative point of view, the controlling of narrative time, as well as the selecting of language have attracted more and more attentions from the literary critics. It is estimated that the number of reviews, essays and dissertations on William Faulkner published in America since the 1980s is only next to William Shakespeare in English world.Yu Hua was one of the most popular contemporary writers who began reconstructing modern Chinese literature in the 1980s, and in the 1990s began publishing a series of light, simple, carefully-drawn novels. His latest work The Brother, represents a major departure in style, length and subject from his previous work.In the middle of 1980s, the Chinese Avant-garde Literature was a narrative revolution that bathed in"the west wind". Yu Hua, as one of the representatives of Avant-garde Literature, is unique among contemporary writers with his unique narrative art. His bold transformation and experiment on narrative pattern has subverted the traditional narrative structure and theme and opened up a new aesthetic art space. Yu Hua's life is so common and bland, while he could obtain such great artistic achievement. It mainly attributes to his foreign"literature teacher"- Faulkner. He regards Faulkner as one of the few writers who can teach others how to write, and is delight to regard himself as the kind of writer like Faulkner. On one hand, we can clearly see Yu Hua's imitation and emulation of Faulkner's narrative art. But meanwhile, that is not a simple imitation for Yu Hua. Various kinds of external influences have broken through the traditional frame, and Yu Hua has formed his unique writing style and pattern. So this thesis is based on the comparative literature theory to get a comprehensive and parallel comparison in the aspects of narrative technique and narrative theme between Faulkner and Yu Hua and further studied the root about Yu Hua's imitation of Faulkner's Narrative art in order to reflect complicated and various connections between Western modernist literature and Chinese contemporary literature.The thesis consists of three parts: introduction, main body and conclusion.The introduction offers a brief survey of the study on the works. It contains the approaches we resort to, the purpose, the innovation and the significance of this thesis.The second part is the main body that is comprised of four chapters.Chapter One is Literature Review, and it made of two sections. The first section mainly introduces the Focalization Theory by Genrard Genett. The theory of Focalization was most frequently studied at the end of the nineteenth century. As a popular concept in narratology, focalization is originated from photography and film. Percy Lubbock is the first person to define this point of view as"the relationship between the narrator and the story", and also he is the first one who subsumed the focalization to the writing techniques in literature.He makes a systematic theoritical study about it in his The Craft of Fiction (1957). Genette firstly introduced this concept in his Narrative Discourse in1972, and his greatest contribution to the literature is the classification of the focalization. He emphasized that the former ones often confused about the relationship between the narrative voice and narrative point of view. Therefore, a distinction should be made between them. So through the classification of the focalization by Genette, the former views the focalization as the voice of the narrator, and the latter defined it as the point of view adopted by the narrator. This is the how Genette defines focalization.In Narrative Discourse (1980), Genette distinguishes three kinds of focalization: zero focalization, internal focalization and external focalization. (Genette,1980: 189-190). So these three kinds of focalization make a remarkable contribution to the literary writing.The second section is about some theories in reference to narrative time. As the time plays a decisive role in literature works, so in this section the author will discuss the"time"on a deeper level from its definition to its influence on the literature works. Chapter Two is made up of two sections, presenting Yu Hua's imitation and development about Faulkner's narrative art. The topic is approached from two aspects, the narrative point of view and the narrative time. As both Faulkner and Yu Hua are the writers craved in narration. The narration, as the mark of Yu Hua's literary creation, enables him to have various entanglements with Faulkner. So this chapter begins its exploration from the two levels of narrative point of view and narrative time to discuss Yu Hua's imitation and development from Faulkner's narrative art.Chapter Three contains three sections, which mainly discuss about the comparative analysis about the narrative theme between Faulkner and Yu Hua. It is discussed mainly from three aspects, the first aspect is the interpreation of the evil, in this part, the author mainly interpretes the evil from three perspectives, the evil of society, the evil of culture, the evil of humanity. The second aspect is the propagating violence and general fate. As we know, these two authors both were obsessed with the violence and had the inclination to the fatalism, so in this part the author will try to discuss the features from these two aspects. The third aspect is the reveal of the warmth and return of the interest. This part will discuss the narrative theme about their later works, and the author will analyze the reason deeply why the themes of their works in their later period changed a lot.Chapter Four consists of two sections, which mainly discuss the root of Yu Hua's imitation about Faulkner's Narrative art from two aspects. The first aspect is the influence of the social background. As we know, the writer is the production of time, so this part will discuss the factor of time. The second aspect is about their similar writing experiences. In this part the author will discuss their similar process of taking the road of literature. Among those modernist writers, the reason why Yu Hua chose Faulkner to be his"teacher"is not occasional. Though they live in different time and region, and are influenced by different culture, they have a lot in common. It is the common ground that contributes to Yu Hua's adoration of Faulkner, and make Yu Hua choose Faulkner as his narrative art teacher and write many works with lots of modern narrative skill. So in this chapter, the author will discuss the sprout of enthusiasm of creation, the resemblance of their writing experience in order to obtain some regular cognition of their literary creations. The conclusion mainly emphasized that Yu Hua fused the western techniques and national experience together and created his unique Yu's writing style. So lastly, hope Yu's writing can live in the sound and fury forever.
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