An Enlightenment that Rejects Pleasure
Five Tragic Dimensions of Su Tong’s Works
Keywords:
Su Tong, tragedy, pleasure, enlightenment, dimensionsAbstract
Su Tong is a famous contemporary Chinese writer whose works are mostly tragedies. Su Tong's tragedies have both breadth of life and depth of thought, and a profound exploration of the reasons for their occurrence, reflecting his humanistic concern in many dimensions. This research is a qualitative research. The purpose is to prove that Su Tong's tragedies are not written for the purpose of artistic "pleasure", but to inherit and carry forward Lu Xun's spirit of "enlightenment". This study selects eight representative tragic works of Su Tong from different periods as source texts and summarises the five dimensions of his tragedies: (i) the physical dimension; (ii) the spiritual dimension; (iii) the cultural dimension; (iv) the social dimension, and finally, (v) the fate dimension. This breaks the convention of studying only a single work or character of Su Tong's tragedies and expands the depth of research of Su Tong's tragedies. The five dimensions of Su Tong's tragedies present a progressive and closely integrated situation, and for the analysis of these five dimensions, we use Zhu Guangqian's theory of "tragedy pleasure" and Lu Xun's theory of " almost nothing in tragedy ". The study found that Su Tong's tragic writings reject "pleasure" as the goal, but continues and expands on Lu Xun's concept of tragic writing for the purpose of "enlightenment". This study summarises the line of development of Su Tong's tragedies from the external to the internal, and presents a panoramic view of the profoundly enlightening connotations of Su Tong's tragedies.
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