The Paradox of Style — Repetitive Writing in Chen Ran's Novels
Abstract
Since the mid-1990s, Chen Ran, together with Lin Bai, Xu Xiaobin, Hai Nan and other writers, has published a number of texts of female private writing, which have become a literary trend attracting wide academic attention. It represents another revival and variation of female writing in the history of contemporary Chinese literature, and is featured by repetitive writing. "Repetitive writing" is a neutral term, which not only refers to the self-repetition in a writer's works, but also carries multiple interpretive dimensions. This paper probes into the repetitive writing in Chen Ran's novels from four aspects: linguistic habituality, the reproduction of character images, the consistent literary aura and the similarity of themes. It also explores its paradoxical relationship with the construction of a writer's style that possesses both fluidity and stability, in the hope that writers can avoid the stereotyping and rigidification of their styles while establishing their own writing styles.
References
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