The voice of ten years of history: A narrative-semiotic approach to the Eight Revolutionary Model Plays
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Liu Shisheng
Abstract
In this article, the author uses a narrative-semiotic approach to discuss the Eight Revolutionary Model Plays of China's Cultural Revolution, which left profound but sometimes negative influences on the lives of Chinese people. Because of the political upheavals of the time, the Eight Revolutionary Model Plays dominated the cultural stage during this special period of Chinese history. However, they have become popular again in recent years — an interesting cultural phenomenon that deserves academic observation Phelan's three narrative voices (mimetic, thematic, and synthetic) are used for narrative analysis and it is determined that these model plays primarily use the thematic voice. Jakobson's semiotic theory of six factors within the speech event is used for semiotic analysis and the result is that each of the six factors has polyphonic features. The conclusion is that although the plays were originally made for political purposes, with time as well as people's appreciation and consumption they have become part of Chinese culture. In this sense, one can say that art, like language, is also a kind of convention.
© 2008 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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Articles in the same Issue
- Foreword
- Introduction: The concept of emergence in philosophical and semiotic context
- Conceptual knowledge as emergence
- Representation as emergence: Evoking and encoding past and history
- Emergence and reference in Whitehead's Process and Reality
- ‘The emergence of an organic form out of a fluid medium’: The dynamic concept of work of art in German Romanticism
- On a special case of meaning-emergence in the literary text: The function of semantic formations with ‘contradictory’ sense-orientation in the process of poetic meaning-evolution
- Did the gods go crazy? Emergence and symbols (a few laws in the symbolism of objects)
- Emergence as a phenomenon of cultural history and language
- Introduction: From linguistic semiotics to cultural semiotics: Semiotic and narrative studies in China
- Anxieties of modernity: A semiotic analysis of globalization images in China
- I Ching and the origin of the Chinese semiotic tradition
- Fictional narrative as history: Reflection and deflection
- The voice of ten years of history: A narrative-semiotic approach to the Eight Revolutionary Model Plays
- The narrative strategy of Chinese avant-garde novels: The case of Mo Yan
- Présentation
- Semiotic research in Morocco: An inventory
- Barthes ou Eco
- Semiotique de la reception et approche semantique du texte litteraire
- La dimension interprétante de l'expérience onirique dans la tradition onirocritique musulmane
- Social context, language, and semiosis in Wole Soyinka
- Le corps comme non-signe dans la tradition arabo-musulmane
