Problematizing the nation: The 'Wang Shuo Phenomenon' and contemporary Chinese culture

Chinese people have experienced significant transformations in imagining their nation since the myth of China as a great socialist center was shattered by the profound reforms in the post-Mao era. For young people who were born and grew up in the socialist period, rebuilding Chinese culture in the post-Mao historical environment meant a profound subversion of the nationalist education that they were imposed on in the past. This thesis investigates how this younger generation deal with the issue of national identification in relation to the construction of the self through examining the "Wang Shuo, phenomenon"---a major controversial cultural phenomenon in contemporary China evoked by writer Wang Shuo's distinct cultural practice. In the late eighties and early nineties, Wang Shuo created in his fiction a new type of "wise-guy" characters who irreverently challenged the authority of the nation-state and the conventional social values; he vehemently mocked and attacked Chinese intellectuals and enthusiastically promoted cultural commodification; he invented a new language style by satirically rewriting Maoist and post-Mao mainstream discourses; and he seized the modern electronic visual media forms, such as film and TV, to help configure contemporary Chinese popular culture. Through looking at the various aspects of the "Wang Shuo Phenomenon," the thesis shows that, although condemned as a "hooligan" for his outrageously iconoclastic practice, Wang Shuo has become a representative of his generation to question the hegemony of a fixed Chinese national identity constituted by the centralized national culture and to construct new narratives of the nation that articulate individuality and personal experience.;The thesis also points out the limitation of Wang Shuo's cultural practice in its view of gender. In order to contrast Wang Shuo's male-centered perspective, it includes an analysis of female writer Wang Anyi's representation of nation and gender. By positioning woman as the historical subject in the narration of the nation, Wang Anyi has presented a powerful intervention into the practice of constructing national identity dominated by males. Juxtaposed together, Wang Shuo and Wang Anyi's narratives reveal how the illusions of various homogeneous entities are being contested while the meaning of being Chinese is redefined.