Spiritual Exploration And Cultural Contemplation

Zhangwei is a great writer who always focuses on spiritual exploration and cultural contemplation and keeps searching for creativity and breakthrough of art. This thesis based on his three representative novels—"Ancient Ship","The Fable of September"and"Ugly or Romance",discussed the intention of spiritual exploration and cutural contemplation in the novels through textuary and cultural analysis.The first chapter centered on the analysis of the main character of Ancient Ship,discussed the Chinese traditional spirit"complementarity of Confucianism and Taoism"and also its significance in cultural criticism and cultural inheritance. In this part, author continued to explain the cultural essence of spiritual exploration and soul salvation of the main character Sui Baopiao through the analysis of"Inquiries of Heaven"and"Manifesto of the Communist Party", both of which were appeared in the novel.The second chapter focuses on the analysis on texuary structure and cultural symbol of"The Fable of September". The thesis compared the four symbolical patterns of"spirit of earth"with the one mentioned by Heidegger, and as a conclusion, the former one contained both Chinese traditional cultural spirit and Heidegger's Existentialism.The final chapter of this thesis was based on the analysis of main characters such as Liu Mila of"Ugly or Romance". Zhangwei began to consider the dual character of"earth culture"dialectically after the publication of"The Fable of September", he integrate the quintessence of"spirit of earth"and city culture to build a way to soul salvation. At last he drew assistance from Western Christain strength to accomplish the cultural integration.The cultural contemplation is involved in the spiritual exploring process of all these three novels among different time. From the cultural criticism and construction of"Ancient Ship"to the cultural symblism and cultural metaphor of"The Fable of September"and finally to the cultual wound and cultural integration of"Ugly and Romance", the spiritual exploration and cultural contemplation in Zhang's novel have always concerned with the spiritual anxiety caused by the crash of cultual localization and globalization.