国立中山大学外国语文研究所.pdf

⊕ 國立中山大學外國語文研究所 碩士論文 The Divided Stage and Its Audience: The Representation of Subjectivity in Laurence Sterne’ s Tristram Shandy 研究生： 邱芳莉 撰 by: Theresa F. Chiou 指導教授： 田偉文教授 Advisor: Professor Rudolphus Teeuwen 中華民國九十三年七月 Abstract Being classified in the “anti-tradition of unclassifiable books,” Laurence Sterne’ s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. has fascinated generations of readers and critics with its seemingly chaotic richness. The narrator Tristram appears to hide his ultimate purpose and unity beneath a cloak of oddity and confusion, which defies any attempt on the reader’ s part to ever pinning it down, and thus opens ground for various debates and critiques. Taking Tristram’ s many futile efforts at tracing back the origin of his life as the starting point, this thesis attempts to explore the author-narrator’s deliberate use of oddity and confusion. The impossibility of ever finding a coherent and definite beginning of one’ s life is read in my study as a metaphor of one’s losing battle at pinning down the concept of self, the embodiment of the ungraspable subjectivity. Not even Locke’ s epistemology or the eighteenth-century knowledge of anthropology can serve as an adequate framework of reference for the account of one’s life, if it is to be interpreted as subjectivity. The fact that men are different from one another arises from their individual hobbyhorse, the manifestation of subjectivity, which resists attempts to be defined exactly and thus makes itself unfathomable. This discovery is the very basis of my reading of Tristram Shandy. Since subjectivity refuses to be grasped, my thesis then proceeds to investigate the way in which Tristram represents this ungraspable subjectivity. The concept of staging is employed in this thesis to explore Sterne’ s deployment of subjectivity. On the stage where the many facets of each character’s singular microcosm are presented, it is demonstrated that the reader is also drawn into Tristram’ s game play, only with the peculiar result that in discovering subjectivity (theirs and ours,) we trespass boundary and assume Tristram’ s subjectivity. Key words: Laurence Sterne, Tristram Shandy, Tristram, self, subjectivity, hobbyhorse, Locke, stage, play, game Table of Contents Introduction: More Handles Than One 1 Chapter One: “Have You Not forgot to Wind Up the Clock?”— Subjectivity and the Split of the Self 10 I. The Ever Receding Beginning as a Metaphor of Subjectivity 10 II. The Oblique Use of Locke’ s Associationism 14 III. The Idiosyncratic Association and the Core of the Self 18 IV. Isolation as the Outgrowth of Subjectivity 20 A. The Unconscious Split of Self from the World 21 B. The Split Between a Fool’ s Cap and an Idealist’ s Heart 30 C. The Deliberate Split between Life and Writing 33 Chapter Two: Manifesting the Ungraspable on the Imaginary Stage 39 I. Subjectivity as Performance 39 A. The Divided Stage Orchestrated by the Actor-Director-Narrator 42 B. Gesture as a Means of Visualizing 45 II. The Characters’ Games and Role Play 52 A. Toby’ s War Games 52 B. Walter’ s Game of Theories and Hypotheses 58 C. Tristram’ s Play of His Own Text and Role 61 Chapter Three: The Constant Speaker on the Stage and the Audience 65 I. “Writing Is But a Different Name for Conversation” 65 A. The Polyphonic Nature of Speech/Writing 66 B. Reader’ s Participation in the Conversation 68 1. The Limited Freedom in Interpreting Text 69 2. The Ample Room for Reader’ s Reflection and Conclusion Drawing 75 C. Writing as a Hobby-horse 79 II. The Humor of the Novel 83 Conclusion 94 Works Cited 99 Chiou 1 Introduction: More Handles Than One Toward the end of his life in 1768, Laurence Sterne wrote one of his last and most interesting letters to an American admirer, Dr. John Eustace of Wilmington, thanking him for sending his favorite author a walking stick with gnarled handle, a “piece of Shandean statuary” (as Eustace called it): Your walking stick is in no sense more shandaic than in that of its having more handles than one— The 。