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4^th run --Lily

主題學研究與中國文學

Thematology East And West: A Survey and Theoretical exploration

Author: Chen Peng-Hsiang

＊ Thematics (Stoffkunde)/ Thematology (thematologie): According to Ulrich Weisstein, this term was created by Harry Lavin. Thematics is about “to trace all the differing versions of, say, the tragedy of Mary Queen Of Schots throughout literature”. Thematics was called “forbidding expression” because even as late as the sixties, people were not willing to incorporate it in comparative literatue, such as Rene Wellek (an outstanding figure of American school). He thought “Stoffgeschichte is the least literary of histories.”

＊ The development of thematics or thematology:

1.     In early age, thematics was criticized by French and American comparatists for being incomplete. “it has no real coherence or dialetic. It presents no single problem and certainly no critical problem.

2.     To Jan Brandt Corstius, he once reminded the scholars that “a thematological study can be of values only insofar as it adds to our knowledge of the characteristics of the various periods of Western literature on the basis of the literary works themselves.”(68)

3.     Levin in his often quoted “Thematics and Criticism,” does take notes of the combinations and permutations of literary themes done by different people and in different times. (68)

＊       Thematics studies vs. general thematic studies

n         The former is a field of study in CL but thematic studies is one of many dimensions in a literary text study.

n         Thematics study deals with one theme (including the same topos 套語, imagery and motifs…etc) in different times and authors, in order to understand a time’s characteristic and the authentic intention. It is different from a theme in a single text. (only chi 238-39)

＊       The definition of Chu-ti’ Hsueh’s 主題學 by the author： “A field of comparative literature, thematology concentrates on the study of the evolution of specific themes, motifs, and especially mythical figures, dealing at the same time with different writers’ treatment of the same theme or motif to voice out their preoccupations and to reflect their times. Meanwhile, recent development in literary methodologies such as phenomenology, hermenutics, semiotics and reader response criticism can in one way or another shed light on our motif studies ”

＊       In Chinese comparative literature

n         Cheng Ch’iao(鄭樵，宋960-126): In the “Yueh-lueh” 樂略 chapter of Tung Chihi 通志 remarks some important words, talking about a tale are very authentic records and treatments through which we are able to comprehend the writers’ states of mind and the spirit of the times in which they were bred.(65)

n         Ku Chieh-kang顧頡剛: “Meng Chiang-nu Ku-shih te chuan-pien” 孟姜女故事的轉變, which is a very important and rather complete folkore study of the Meng Chiang-nu theme. (Chi’Liang’s wifge wailed for her husband and thereby toppling the wallof Chi and Chulà to Tang daynasty, Meng Chung-tzu wailed for her dead husband against the Great Wall.)

u       Ku were juxtaposed with Levin and Corstius’ theories abobe. And Ku preempted by some forty years.

u       Ku provided other researchers with patterns and methodology, but the thematology in China seems to have bee a “dead body” from the late thirties through to the early seventies. （70） Chinese scholar’s theoretic exploration of thematology, as the matter goes, is still rather weak; the systematic research in thematic study is still lack.  (ex.eng71, chi239 )

u       The tales and legend s Ku mentioned in his parargrap such as Dragon King , the Eight Immortals besides Chung K’ui, Chu-ko Liang and Hsu Wen-ch’ang are not yet fully investigated. Only Pao-kung, Liangzhu were investigated during the 55 years.

n         鄭明俐：<孫行者與猿猴的故事> was similar to early thematic study lacking for asking “why” the “transformation” occurred.

n         王秋桂： <孟姜女故事早期版本的發展> suppressed Ku’s research.

n         曾永義： In 1969 he published an article about Liangzhu and tried to build the fundamental theory for developing Chinese tales and legends. (eng )

＊       The trouble of Chinese research:

n         lacking more in-depth theoretical exploration.  How to implant the alien concept of “motif” into native literary soil presented another more intriguing problem.

n         What is worse, they have as yet not penetrated the relation between theme and character, motif and theme and images, etc. (72)

＊       In Western development

n         The convenience of their use of raw folklore materials: Finnish scholar Antti Aarne published his categorization of Western folktales in 1910 (only base on Scandinavian sources). Scholars of most of the Western countries and even Japan has striven to work out separate systems for their respective folktales.

n         Motif Index of Folk Literature in 1932-36: Stuith Thompson compiled and translated Aarne’s Types of the Folktale and collect materials to finish this six-volume monumental index. It lists and classifies motifs into 23 categories drawn from over 40,000 tales, myths, fables, romance, ballads, jestbooks, exempla, and other modes of narration. (72) Thompson divided stories into type and motif and asserted “constituent motifs.” In this point of view, thematics study should focus on the study of motifs. (only chi 239)

n         Classification of the tales: Vladimir Propp in his Morphology of the Folktale (1928) decomposes these fairy tales from the Arne-Thompson story types 300-749, and classifies the fundamentals drawn into thirty-one function (equivalent to “motif” or “constituent element”)

u       Type: “a traditional tale that has an independent existence,” though “it may indeed happen to be told with another tales.”

u       Motif: “the smallest element in a tale having a power to persist in tradition.” There are three classes of motifs: 1. the actors in a tale. 2. certain items in the back-ground of the action. 3. single incidents (this class comprises the great majority of motifs, and it is this that can have an independent existence).

u       A type “may consist of only one motif or of many.” (73)

u       A protagonist may be classified as a theme or a motif, which depends on its function in the text. EX孟姜女 is a theme an also a motif.

n         The interpretation of the meaning of myth: thirty decades later, Claude Levi-Strauss applied and extended Propp’s method in his study to interpret the meaning of myth with great success. (thematics 之方法與結構主義密切相關)

＊       To include in thematology the study of lyric poetry, especially into Chinese poetry.

n         Image and topos (topoi套語) may constitute as a motif: they should also play an important role, especially with reference to their active and central function (say, as symbols) in lyrics and other modes of poetry. They serve as motifs, whether simple or complex, the constituent elements of a piece of literary work.

n         Image clusters do not necessarily go into the making of motifs. For instance, the seasonal motif in the first two stanzas of Part II of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight which. At least 45 lines and images but they may not all turn into a motif.  For instance. The statistics about the treatment of autumn in English and Chinese poems. (0.53% and 0.28% to the treatment of autumn and spring in English poems; 5.68% and 1.99% in Chinese counterpart)

＊       The relation between motif and symbol may be much closer than that between image and symbol.

n         Jung in his work Man and His Symbols mention that motifs (“single symbols”) are equivalent to archetypes (“primordial images”). In the aesthetic sphere, Northrop Frye gives the name “archetype” to “symbol” in its phase as “a symbol in its aspect as a verbal unit in a literary work of art.”  A poem itself is as a “structure of interlocking motifs”

n         Motif is “that which moves and leads to doing something,” and “structural elements of repetition, variation and elaboration and so on, its final mingling with the concept of symbol was not wholly unjustifiable.”

＊       The relation between Motif and Theme

n         In thematology, themes are commonly represented by specific personalities, such as Odysseus as the crystallization of quest, and Christ as an epitome of the mythical pattern of life-death-and –resurrection. “Themes are linked to characters”

n         A motif is formed when two or more images recur. Its recurrence, enables it to be taken as a symbol. A motif, for Vaselovskij, as “the most elementary narrative unit” might prove helpful for most narrations. A motif or two might constitute a theme.

n         Weissten has said “motifs are the smaller units, and themes the larger.”

n         Most theorists generally agree that “motifs relate to situations.” Situations are Thompson’s “certain items in the background of the action” and “single incidents.”

＊       Finding the fundamentals in a works can help us to analyses the structure or model of a poem or a text.

n         Topical words and phrases: such as 楓葉、白露、西風, they are the indicator or pointer to point straightforwardly to the poem. They are also topical at once in manifesting the flow of a rhetorical convention and the tenor of a poem. (77)

u       To evince the tenor of decadence or sadness, western poets mostly used the motifs of sunset, fallen leaves, autumn cicada… to evoke the feelings.

The processes involved in working out the themes are no more than contrast, intensification, and/ or combination. (79)