| Gao Xingjian, the Nobel laureate in literature in 2000, announced "Cold Literature" to be the core of his literary mind and practice. This thesis examines how the writer accomplishes such a literary cannon in his fictional writings.; There are three conceptual and practical inquiries in the thesis research: Cognitively, Gao's notion of Cold Literature indicates a switch of textual construction from the Aristotelian model about plot, characterization and overall structure, to an exclusively concentrated mimesis of the inner being. Ideologically, through the Brechtian alienation-effect, Cold Literature builds a group of binary opposites, such as female/male, nature/society, religion/secularity, nether world/this world, etc., and re-evaluates the broader cultural codes underlying the textual binaries. Rhetorically, Gao's fictional narrative foregrounds a series of figures of rhetoric, such as pronouns as protagonists, stream-of-language, fantasies, merging of genres, etc., to defamiliarize/estrange the conventional literary norms as well as a seemingly intimate world by disrupting the acts of perception and recognition.; The thesis comes to the conclusion that, as the canon of Gao's literary practice, Cold Literature connotes a writer's ontological perceptions of the reality of literary creation, literary representation, and fictional narrative. |
