가오싱젠 문학 사상 연구

Abstract

Gao Xingjian’s literary thought traces its origins to A Preliminary Exploration of the Techniques of Modern Fiction (1981). It subsequently develops through his writings composed after his exile in France during the 1990s—such as Cold Literature and the Preface to Without Isms—and further through essays written in the aftermath of his Nobel Prize in the 2000s, including The Reason for Literature and Literature as Testimony: The Pursuit of Truth. Taken together, these works reveal both a sense of “continuity” and “difference.” The former lies in his partial retention of the concerns that had engaged him deeply in the literary debates of early 1980s China, while the latter reflects his departure from the literary perspectives of that period and his construction of a new “position of literature.” This study concludes that a significant difference—largely overlooked in earlier criticism—exists between the literary ideas articulated in A Preliminary Exploration of the Techniques of Modern Fiction and those elaborated in his post-exile writings. This difference, I argue, marks a “conservatization” of Gao Xingjian’s literary thought. Moreover, a close examination of his works published in the 1990s and 2000s reveals that his literary thought exposes several critical limitations.