Research On The Expression Of Material In Hongkong Modernist Literature Since1970S

The special history and reality of Hong Kong make writers concerned with the material world. HK Literature is full of descriptions of artificiality, such as daily appliances, consumer goods, food, civic architectures, yet very few natural objects are mentioned. Through reading HK literature, the author realizes the fact that a new relationship began to appear from the1970s between the material and human being during the continuous literary writing about the material by the broaden sense Hong Kong modernism literature, and it represents an ’outward’trend of HK literature. This kind of ’outward’ trend indicates a shifting focus of modernism literature from the excavation of the inner consciousness and desire in the1950s—60s to the observation, communication and interposal of external reality. This paper tries, by the way of the new human being—material relationship, to solve the problem how Hong Kong writers can deal with the relationship between themselves and the external environment by writing about the mental—physical relationship. This paper also tries, by the way of discussion about the material and Hong Kong characteristics as a whole, to reveal why current HK literature carries’Hong Kong characteristics’in terms of its material aesthetics, as well as what possibilities the current HK literature may bring to the exploration of the Sense of Nativeness in HK.This paper develops itself in three chapters. The first chapter discusses the possibilities as well as necessity of literary writing about the material from two aspects, the city’s external reality environment and the literature’s inner logic. The writers are sensitive to the human being—material relationship because of the Hong Kong history and reality. The introduction of the western philosophy and literature theory aided with concepts and technical support to deal with the human being—material relationship. The second chapter is aimed at hackling the Hong Kong writers’ description of the human being-material relationship from the diachronic angle: from Liu Yichang’s initial experiments of the ’material notice’ in the late1960s to the Xi xi and Liang Bingjun’s expand, then to the innovation in the70s and80s, to Dong Qizhang’s continuous exploration of the human being—aterial relationship in90s, and finally to the materialized world created in Han Lizhu’s novels in the early21st century. This paper tries to show the distinctive characteristics of each writer and outlines the writing vein of the modernism whose development combines inheritance and changes. At the same time, this chapter will induct the French new novels as a frame of reference for comparison, so as to reveal the ’newness’ of the new human being—material relationship. The third chapter discusses changes of the literature writing ways and the meaning of the phenomenon caused by new human being—material relationship from the synchronic angle, that is, how literary writing, as a subversive practice, revolts the materialization of human beings and materialization of material at the same time, and opens up new room for HK post-colonialism statements.