Introduction

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Acknowledgments v
3. Contents vii
4. Illustrations ix
5. Introduction 1
6. Freedom and Literature 11
7. Gao Xingjian’s Transcultural Aesthetics in Fiction, Theater, Art, and Film 19
8. The Aesthete as Revolutionary: Saving Art from Politics 43
9. The Silence of Buddha: Triangulating Gao Xingjian, Brecht, and Beckett 57
10. Gao Xingjian’s Notion of Freedom 73
11. Reading Gao Xingjian’s Treatment of Freedom in Soul Mountain and One Man’s Bible in the Sartrean Framework 79
12. The Concept of Freedom in Gao Xingjian’s Novel One Man’s Bible 93
13. Sex, Freedom, and Escape in Gao Xingjian’s One Man’s Bible 99
14. Wild Man and the Idea of Freedom 105
15. Toward an Aesthetics of Freedom 121
16. Gao Xingjian Carefree: Of Mountains and Seas and Carefree as a Bird 139
17. Tradition and Freedom: The Artistic World of Gao Xingjian and His Play Hades 149
18. Multivocality as Critique of Reality: Fate and Freedom in Gao Xingjian’s The Man Who Questions Death 171
19. Between Memory and Forgetting: Ten Years after Gao Xingjian’s Winning of the Nobel 185
20. Finding Freedom and Reshaping Fate: An Exile’s Disentanglement from Obsession in Gao Xingjian’s Novels 203
21. Fate as (Re)Visioning of the Self in Soul Mountain 225
22. Trap Revisited: The Man Who Questions Death and the Tragedy of Modern Man 241
23. Index of Works by Gao Xingjian 259
24. Name Index 261