Words of passion : narrative technologies of modern China
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This dissertation brings together Chinese literary and cultural studies, cognitive narratology, and digital humanities (DH) to explore the relationship between embodied cognition and the narrative form. Whereas traditional scholarship considered Chinese narrative artifacts as reflections of distinct ideological configurations (e.g., "Late Qing, " "Mao's China, " "post-socialism, " etc.), the techno-cognitive framework developed in this project brackets such historiographical categories and instead foregrounds formal continuities across political divides and epistemic shifts. Rather than explaining such observable transhistorical patterns through the prism of "Chinese tradition, " however, this project employs computational tools of humanistic inquiry to anchor formal features of narratives in the transcultural phenomenology of the human body, thus departing from the politicized and nationalized focus of much previous and current scholarship. Since the late 1960s, one of the dominant interpretive paradigms in literary and cultural studies has been Marxist historicism, also known under the term "genealogy, " which grounded cultural phenomena in historically situated structures of power. By contrast, this dissertation recovers the forgotten tradition of formalist school of literary criticism and showcases narrative elements whose significance is not exhausted by the sociohistorical contexts of their emergence. Specifically, my project draws upon findings from affective neuroscience indicating that human cognition is fundamentally embodied, i.e., the whole human body is deeply involved in how we perceive, make sense of, and interact with the world. As such, my dissertation offers a corrective to the disembodied paradigm of "distant reading" as it has been formulated so far in DH literature. In accordance with its anti-historicist ambition, this dissertation is conceived as a problematical rather than a chronological study. Each chapter explores a different narratological question from a biocultural perspective, including the Theory of Mind, situational schemas, narrative empathy, social identity, and the problem of character, which are then localized in the specific context of Chinese literary and cultural studies. Narrative technologies considered in this project include the metaphor of the heart (xin 心) as the center of cognitive and emotional life, the aesthetic of the sublime, the trope of the suffering woman, the we-narrative, and the distribution of agency among fictional characters. Dispersing narrative artifacts onto desynchronized timelines and multiple recursive structures, this dissertation demonstrates that narratives contain a mixture of historically stable and unstable elements, as does any technology, and encourages us to appreciate the "texture" of narrative works -- ordered collections of lexemes or words -- rather than treating them as mere epiphenomena of collective tradition.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource. |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2023; ©2023 |
| Publication date | 2023; 2023 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Kurzynski, Maciej Patryk |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Lee, Haiyan |
| Thesis advisor | Lee, Haiyan |
| Thesis advisor | Algee-Hewitt, Mark |
| Thesis advisor | Ilchuk, Yuliya |
| Thesis advisor | Wang, Ban, 1957- |
| Degree committee member | Algee-Hewitt, Mark |
| Degree committee member | Ilchuk, Yuliya |
| Degree committee member | Wang, Ban, 1957- |
| Associated with | Stanford University, School of Humanities and Sciences |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Chinese |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Maciej Patryk Kurzynski. |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Chinese. |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2023. |
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/gw016ng5351 |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2023 by Maciej Patryk Kurzynski
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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