Intertestualità transculturale nella saggistica di Gao Xingjian: il caso studio di Ziyou yu wenxue

Gao Xingjian is a Chinese-born (1940) exile writer, French citizen since 1998, and a Nobel Prize winner for Literature (2000). He is also a multifaceted contemporary artist and essay writer, who stands as a globally-respected intellectual. This dissertation examines a specific part of his essay writing and focuses on intertextuality. This research aims at retracing some of the core issues of Gao Xingjian’s critical thought expressed through the essays, and at showing the consistency of the polyphony in the texts, namely the explicit or concealed relationship with Chinese culture and with other linguistic and cultural codes. This research is grounded in a preliminary study of the concepts of intertextuality developed by the western literary theory and historically by the Chinese aesthetic tradition. This study was essential for the elaboration of theoretical structures as well as a specific model to apply on the selected corpus. The latter is composed by twelve essays of meta-artistic and meta-literary reflection, composed by Gao Xingjian between 2008 and 2014. These essays, collected in the volume Ziyou yu wenxue 自由與文學 [Freedom and literature] and published in Taiwan, are among the most recent works in his extensive theoretical production, still peripherally discussed by critics. This dissertation investigates and describes the selected essays from a thematic and linguistic point of view. The thematic profile firstly identifies the leitmotifs of Gao Xingjian’s critical thought, such as subjectivity and individuality, languages and codes for artistic and literary creation, borders and freedom for the individual and aesthetic experience. Hereafter, the study on the intertextual links follows three axes: vertical, where the texts inherit and re-elaborate units of content from the Chinese perspective; horizontal, when the texts absorb and re-contextualize cultural elements from other 2 cultures; and oblique, when the texts suggest a dialogue with previous essays written by Gao Xingjian. The linguistic profile considers the lexical and rhetoric level, where the Sinophone surface of the texts stands in “consonance” or “dissonance” with the Chineseness of the semantic aspects. Therefore, this part of the analysis is implemented from a bifocal perspective, based on two categories: Sinophony-Chineseness and Sinophony-Otherness. Furthermore, it evaluates the use of language without trying to attribute or determine a cultural identity for the author or the texts. The most relevant results of this research concern the corpus analysed, the author’s profile, and the methodology of the intertextual analysis. Interestingly, the critical analysis revealed the emergence of several elements that confute some of the author’s statements that may be interpreted in the context of the author’s relationship with the Chinese language and his role in the western intellectual domain. Nevertheless, this research highlights some typical features of Gao Xingjian’s contemporary essay writing and that the texts examined are inhabited by multiple voices, dialogues, and other texts. Hence, observing this texture of codes without getting lost in the dissemination of meaning represents a real challenge for the careful Sinophone reader. Finally, this research illustrates the efficiency of some specific categories and methods, but keeps the discussion open to new methodologies and perspectives.