（英语语言文学专业论文）在丽塔·达芙的诗集《托马斯和比尤拉》中探寻真理.pdf

摘要 v 摘摘 要要 美国历史上第一位黑人桂冠诗人丽塔达芙（1952- ）1987 年出版的诗集 托马斯与比尤拉以达芙外祖父母的生活为原型，通过动情的诗歌形式将历 史事件与个人经历完美地编织在一起，体现了诗人对生命的现实关怀以及热爱 生活的情怀。本文从诗集中的日常生活细节入手来揭示普通人的生活本质；通 过剖析男女主人公对现实生活态度的转变来探寻生命的真理，从而发现人类具 体而实在的日常体验构成终极现实，生活的意义就是体味其中呈现的丰富感性 和实现其感性满足。 美国学术界对这部诗集的研究主要集中于丽塔达芙的历史观以及她的世 界大同主义思想，他们通过赋予个体生活中的事物以象征或类型意义，强化了 意识形态在个体生活中的重要性。本文将以普通人的日常生活作为切入点，剥 离附在生活之上的意识形态的对抗，在生活世界的地基上寻求通向生命的真理 之路。而生命之真理的问题关键在于个体意识的觉醒，而这种真理只有成为个 体生命的自觉，才可能走向一种自在的生命状态。 丽塔达芙通过这部诗集探讨了一个古老而又永远重要的问题：生活的目 的和意义何在。长期以来，感性的日常生活遭到摒弃，神性和理性的精神生活 占据着重要地位；“生活”在理性主义的天空下支离破碎。20 世纪以来，越来 越多的哲学家将目光投向日常生活和生活本身，积极重塑实在生活。诗歌也经 历了从为政治、历史、英雄歌功颂德的宏大叙事，走向对人类集体经历、理性 主义的尊重，再进入到个体生活的核心。达芙的诗集托马斯与比尤拉体现 了当代诗歌从宏大叙事到生活叙事的转变，契合了关注普通人的日常生活的时 代理念。达芙将诗歌的触角伸展到了生活的每一个角落，通过家常的意象和丰 富的细节来唤回人们对生活的关注。整部诗集从头至尾都渗透着对平凡生活中 点点滴滴的青睐，拥有一种真正贴近现实人生的情感温度。本文通过分析托马 斯和比尤拉生活中的细节来体现微小细腻的情绪，还生活以具体琐碎的真实面 貌，呈现平凡生活中的素朴之美；生活对于人们的酬劳就在于一点一滴的琐事。 达芙通过对两个普通人的生活的生动描绘恢复了生活的质感和生机，使人感受 到了精细的生命过程，同时意识到人的感性才是人类生活的根基所在，正是生 活中的爱和痛才使得生命完满而富有魅力。 摘要 vi 诗集中托马斯和比尤拉分别经历了从逃离生活-接受生活-融入生活的 人生历程，体现出诗人对生活的独特理解和思考：每个人都无法逃离具体而实 在的生活现场，生活是最本真的实在，是一种自身具有目的性的存在方式。诗 集同时暗示生活是“活”的世界，不是观念或符号所建构的“僵死”的世界。 人类需要通过理性逻辑去分析和认知世界并从中得出客观真理，但是人类更应 该通过活生生的个体的灵性去感受生活世界，在世俗与此岸的处身中呵护和体 验日常生活中能证实生命存在的细节和点滴、琐屑与片断、感性与美感。 关键词：关键词：丽塔达芙；托马斯与比尤拉；真理；日常生活；体验； abstract iii abstract rita dove(1952- ), the first african-american ever named poet laureate of the united states, published in 1987 a collection of poems thomas and beulah modeled on the lives of her grandparents. this poetry emotively blends historical events and personal experiences, giving expression to the poets realistic solicitude for human life and affection on life. this thesis is to uncover the essence of ordinary life through particulars in daily life and to search for truth of life by analyzing in-depth the transformation of the two protagonists attitudes towards actual life, thus justifying that human beings concrete and actual daily experiences are the supreme realities and the meaning of life lies in rich perceptual experiences and its actualized self-gratification. american critics generally concur that two distinctive features of thomas and beulah are its attitudes towards history and the idea of cosmopolitanism. in their critic works, things in individual lives are endowed with symbolical and typological meanings, thus reinforcing the prominent position of ideology in human life. yet this thesis sees ordinary peoples daily life as a subject, clear of the ideological confrontation imposed on their life, attempting to seek a path on the ground of life world which leads to truth of life. but the key to truth of life is the awakening of individual awareness because only the truth is personally appropriated can there be possibility of living a life of ease. in thomas and beulah, rita dove makes an exploration of the purpose and meaning of life which has become one of the oldest questions whose importance does not diminish. for a very long time, daily life was undervalued while divine or rational spiritual life stood in a dominant position, resulting in a disintegrated outlook of life against the backdrop of the prevailing rationalism. since 20th century, more attention from philosophers has been drawn to daily life and life itself with an attempt to remold concrete life. poetry has also developed in such a way as from eulogizing politics, history and heroes in the form of grand narrative, to respecting human beings collective experience and rationalism, and then to concerning the core of abstract iv individual life. rita doves thomas and beulah reveals the contemporary poetrys shift from grand narrative to life narrative, which conforms to the contemporary idea of concerning daily life of ordinary people. dove extends poetry to every corner of life, trying to call peoples attention to life through commonplace images and abundant particulars. the whole poetry suggests doves favor for ordinary life and displays a sense of warmth that is truly close to real life. by analyzing the details of thomas and beulahs life, this thesis reflects exquisite emotions and recovers the real trivial life, which gives full play to the beauty of simple ordinary life. life repays individuals with trifles. dove resumes lifes tactile sensation and vitality through vivid description of two ordinary peoples life, which brings about exquisite life courses. meanwhile, it can be realized that sensibility is the basis of human beings life and it is love and pain that makes life fully lived and charming. in this poetry, thomas and beulah undergo two different life courses commonly characterized by shifts of life stances from escaping from life, then to accepting life, and eventually to being committed to life, which reflects the poets unique understanding and thinking towards life, that is everyone cannot escape from discrete and real life; life is the realest actuality, a kind of autotelic existence. meanwhile, the poetry implies that life is a living world, not a dead world constructed by concepts or symbols. it is necessary for human beings to draw objective truth by analyzing and perceiving the world through logic and reason. more importantly, man desperately needs to experience the earthly life world at the very place in which they live for the moment through spirituality of living individuals, cherish and experience the particulars, trivia, sensibility and beauty in daily life that can prove lifes actuality. key words: rita dove; thomas and beulah; truth; daily life; experience 学位论文独创性声明 i 学位论文独创性声明学位论文独创性声明 本人声明所呈交的学位论文是本人在导师指导下进行的研究工作及取得的 研究成果。据我所知，除了文中特别加以标注和致谢的地方外，论文中不包含 其他人已经发表或撰写过的研究成果，也不包含为获得 南昌大学 或其他教育 机构的学位或证书而使用过的材料。与我一同工作的同志对本研究所做的任何 贡献均已在论文中作了明确的说明并表示谢意。 学位论文作者签名（手写） ： 签字日期： 年 月 日 学位论文版权使用授权书学位论文版权使用授权书 本学位论文作者完全了解南昌大学有关保留、使用学位论文的规定，有权 保留并向国家有关部门或机构送交论文的复印件和磁盘，允许论文被查阅和借 阅。本人授权南昌大学可以将学位论文的全部或部分内容编入有关数据库进行 检索，可以采用影印、缩印或扫描等复制手段保存、汇编本学位论文。同时授 权中国科学技术信息研究所将本学位论文收录到中国学位论文全文数据库 ， 并通过网络向社会公众提供信息服务。 （保密的学位论文在解密后适用本授权书） 学位论文作者签名（手写） ： 导师签名（手写） ： 签字日期： 年 月 日 签字日期： 年 月 日 acknowledgements ii acknowledgements i owe a great debt of gratitude to all those who have helped me in various ways with my thesis. first and foremost, i would like to thank my supervisor, dr.liu wen, who has provided me constant inspiration and encouragement during my graduate time. his unique outlooks on life, poetry and knowledge evoke my reflection on the meaning and purpose of life, thus exerting a great impact on the composition of my thesis. thanks to his insightful comments, the thesis turned out to be possible. many thanks should also be given to professor liu tianlun, professor yuan xuesheng, professor huang hongling, professor liao hongzhong, professor yao qian and professor zhou pingyuan. they have contributed many valuable suggestions which were incorporated into the final version of this thesis. i am also grateful to them for their encouragement during my study at nanchang university. my last but not the least gratitude is presented to my family and friends who were most generous with their time in doing a lot of work for me. their support was highly important to me all the way. chapter one introduction 1 chapter one introduction rita doves thomas and beulah asserts a commitment to the value of ordinary life and the delicate texture of daily life. much of the poetry searches for a greater truth and deeper reality than the fact of two ordinary peoples survival. the search for truth involves uncovering and living the intensity of particulars in which various emotions and the beauty of life are revealed. the purpose of life lies in life itself. 1.1 research question and significance properly speaking, there are two approaches to truth, the external and the internal, in other words, the objective and the subjective. “the objective approach is generally the approach of science, of physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, etc. the internal searches have been of the psychologists, the psycho-analysis and, in the end, the mystic of the world.”1 however, it seems that the two kinds of searches havent ended up with a final answer to all the questions of life. human beings, scientists in particular, are occupied with seeking truth by struggling to analyze, explain or justify what happens. however, human beings cannot derive a contented life from science world. “half a century ago, humanistic thinkers were heralding a great awakening that would usher in a golden age of enlightened living. people such as, erich fromm, carl rogers, abraham maslow, rollo may and viktor frankl were laying the groundwork for a new social order distinguished by raised consciousness, depth of purpose and ethical refinement. this tantalising vision was the antithesis of the contemporary society of blinkered narcissists and hypnogogic materialists.”2 life is now characterized by goal-orientation and planning as human beings harbors the uniform dream of betterment. we have been trained to be the “people of tomorrow”, inhabiting an apparently sagacious and so-called civilized world. it seems that life is always about to beginreal life. erich fromm signaled the debut of the one-dimensional “marketing character”a robotic, all-consuming creature, “well-fed, well-entertained, chapter one introduction 2 passive, unalive and lacking in feeling.”3 what human beings need to worry about now is not the possibility of robots replacing humans but the tendency of humans becoming robotic. the prevailing consumer culture is now driving people incomplete, shallow, and dehumanized. people under great pressure would like to relax in virtual space rather than have meaningful conversations with family members or friends in their real life. nothing is greater than what can render it non-threatening, insubstantial, or, best of all, entertaining. do we live for what we live on? is there anything that makes our life worth living? gil troy, a history professor writing in the new york times, made such a claim when contemplating the possibilities of human behavior in the contemporary world: “our challenge today is to find meaning not in a national crisis, but in an individuals ordinary life.”4 out of this cock-up comes the most pressing question of our age: whats the purpose or meaning of life? 1.2 general review of the research “whats the purpose or meaning of life” is quite possibly one of the oldest, biggest but eternally important questions of human society. but there does not seem to be a universal understanding of the meaning of the question itself. some philosophers focus on “purpose” and “meaning”, thus coming up with questions like, “does purpose or meaning even exist?” or “what is purpose and meaning?” however, some thinkers would say that is asking too much. perhaps all we need to know first is the answer to the question, “what is life all about?” western metaphysicians “looked upon everything as being, a rational abstract being, regardless of the vivid sensuous substance.”5 they were absorbed in explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world with the aim of inducing everything from being. they either attempted to employ the concept of rational being to replace the living world or aimed to confirm the absolute position of a particular being (god or human beings) above other beings. lebensphilosophie is the first reaction against the conceit of being, “turning away from purely theoretical knowledge towards the undistorted fullness of lived experience.”6 this movement is marked, on the one hand, by striving to overcome the limits placed on the isolated individual through a vitalistic affirmation of the chapter one introduction 3 fullness of life, and on the other hand by a mood of pessimism and decadence which received its most powerful expression in arts. “the emphasis on feeling and immediacy, and the lived experience of truth, together with the search for a unifying principle prior to the abstractions of reason, leads to a prioritization of life.”7 the centrality of the concept of life was vested in the works of schopenhauer and nietzsche. schopenhauers concept of the will(distinct from reason) as a single, unifying principle provides a pessimistic outlook upon life and reality. thus, he believed that he had found “the only narrow way to truth.” in contrast, nietzsches importance resides in his attempt to elaborate truth in terms of its function for life, and his insistence on the dynamic, historical and conflictive character of human claims to knowledge. in his eyes, man is the source for good and evil. hitler followed nietzsches perspective of truth and integrated this into his own point of view of what is truth, which resulted in the holocaust and the death of millions. a third and later figure of comparable importance is the french philosopher henri bergson whose ideas were taken up as part of the vitalist opposition to scientific materialism and the attempt to show that life cannot adequately be explained in mechanical and physical terms: biology rather than physics provides the central categories for understanding life in its own terms. perhaps the most enduring achievement of lebensphilosophie is to be found in the works of wilhelm dilthey. his emphasis on the concrete fullness of lived experience and the diversity of the manifestations of social and cultural life prior to the abstractions of reason resulted in a new attempt to ground philosophically the human sciences. life-world is the place of living. the concept of “life-world”, first put forward in the crisis of the european sciences by husserl, is clearly differentiated from the “objective scientific world” (only part of the life-world) in that the life-world is characterized by the fact that everything within its sphere is fundamentally experiential. this “crisis” of the european sciences is that human existence and the world itself cannot have meaning if science grants truth only to what is objectively established in the manner of the sciences. the objective science bodies can have nothing to say regarding the meaningfulness of life, because in its claim to objectivity it necessarily abstracts objectivity from everything subjective. just as the chapter one introduction 4 objective-scientific world is the horizon of potentialities (actualized or not) that exist for the natural sciences, the life-world is the horizon of potentialities that exist for all of human life. for husserl, the life-world is the world of the “plain certainty of experience”. thus, the life-world is “pre-scientific” in that it exists and is perceived in a way that comes before methodology, theory, and accomplishment of the objective sciences. the world of science is a world defined by its orientation towards a certain set of goals, and its claims to truth and “reality” are determined in their relation to this goal, under the rule of their highest end. in contrast to the objective-scientific world, the pre-given life-world exists without any guiding interest. the life-world is subjective and relative; it exists relative to the subject as the one who experiences a fundamentally experiential world of life. husserls critique of science is not meant to suggest hostility towards science. awareness of the problems facing science and the desire to inquire into the sense and limit of its validities is something much different than opposition or animosity. daily life, which has long been undervalued and excluded in philosophy, was first introduced by marx into his realistic study, and then with the efforts made by theorists such as lukacs, husserl, heidegger, lefebvre and featherstone, the meaning and value of daily life has drawn increasingly intense attention from all walks of life. henri lefebvre, an “existential marxist”, put forward the concept of everyday life in his three-volume the critique of everyday life and continues to influence the development not only of philosophy but also of sociology, geography, political science and literary criticism. lefebvre claims that there are fundamental differences among “daily life”, “everyday life”, and “everydayness”: “daily life” is concrete and rich life with its own unique style in pre-scientific society; “everyday life” is monotonous, uniform and tedious life with robotic rhythm in modern society; “everydayness” refers to banality and repetition of life quality. he strongly criticizes the alienated everyday life and the uniform and repetitive everydayness as well. according to him, everyday life in the modern world has been completely incorporated into the whole link of production and consumption. “and nowadays we are still struggling with this deep-in other wordseveryday contradiction: what makes each of us a human being also turns that human being into something chapter one introduction 5 inhuman.”8 the modern society has become a bureaucratic society of controlled consumption instead of either a leisure society or an affluent society full of free choices for people. a cultural revolution based on everyday life, in his opinion, is the only solution to save the life of modernity. lefebvre also continues to be an influence on the work of david harvey, fredric jameson etc. with the development of their study, daily life has gradually come to the academic circle of the age. therefore, it is an important task for the literary critics to throw away their intention to neglect or even reject daily life in their study, to reestablish the perspective of daily life in literature study, and based on this, to reexamine literary works, culture and theoretical systems. moreover, with view to the happiness of human beings, it is also necessary to acknowledge, respect and highlight th