| dc.description.abstract | My thesis, ‘Comparative Freedoms: Conceptions of Freedom in post-1950 American,
Australian and Chinese Fiction’ seeks to investigate the transcultural continuities and
discontinuities in liberal thinking concerning personal freedom across the United States,
Australia and China, by examining textual explorations of ideas of freedom from within
these different cultures. A discussion of ideas of personal freedom necessarily involves an
engagement with concepts of ‘selfhood’ within these countries, for as Isaiah Berlin so
justly notes, ‘conceptions of freedom directly derive from views of what constitutes a
self, a person, a man’.1 2 3
There are a number of reasons for the continued influence of the United States as
a world leader in modern conceptions of freedom. ‘No idea is more fundamental to
Americans’ sense of themselves as individuals and as a nation than freedom’“ suggests
Eric Foner, the leading historian on American freedom. Indeed ‘freedom’ has become a
central term in American discourse, so much so the language of freedom has come to
permeate all aspects of American culture.’ In our increasingly globalised world, has
United States interventionist foreign policy and cultural imperialism transplanted,
alongside McDonald’s, American understandings of freedom to other parts of the globe?
Or is the concept of freedom culturally and linguistically contingent, as proponents of
‘Asian values’ and cultural specificity would suggest?4 I attempt to explore these
questions in relation to Australia, a country considered in many respects to be America’s
closest cousin; and in regards to China, thought of by many as America’s diametric
opposite. Thus, my thesis focuses upon the impact of cultural globalisation on ideas of
personal freedom as refracted through the prism of contemporary fiction.
I have chosen to examine contemporary fiction not only because literature can
offer unique insight into a culture but also because the creative act in itself has long been
considered a close expression of personal freedom (because it can be seen as a reflection
of ‘noumenal’ insight). 5 Furthermore it is evident that imaginative writing provides a
liberating space for the discussion of what has often been a politically sensitive subject. If
literature is thought to be so closely related to personal freedom, then to what extent has
the increased global circulation of literature and its popular surrounding critical
discourses such as postmodernism, poststructualism and postcolonialism, also contributed
to changes in people’s conceptions of freedom? Given that freedom itself is a relative
concept often defined by comparison, authors covered in my dissertation seek to explore
the concept in reference to alternatives found in foreign works and cultures.
The thesis is set out in four chapters, the first of which explores conceptions of
freedom in internationally popular works of American fiction such as Ken Kesey’s One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962), Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate
(1959), Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch (1959), and Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997)
alongside his Mao 7/(1991) and White Noise (1985), in an attempt to establish a basis for
comparison regarding ideas of personal freedom. It approaches the contemporary
conception of American freedom as inherently associated with the ideas of democracy and individualism and significantly influenced by traditional frontier mythology
(specifically the archetypal figure of the outlaw hero), the psychological impact of the
Cold War, consumerism and the advent of literary postmodernism.
The second chapter on Australian fiction begins with Peter Mathers’ Trap (1966)
and David Ireland’s The Unknown Industrial Prisoner (1971), in order to explore the
Australian manifestations of the outlaw hero and surrounding frontier mythology in
comparison to the handling of similar themes in Kesey’s Cuckoo’s Nest. Ireland’s novel
is also used to explore the impact of modern liberal capitalism and neo-imperialism on
personal freedom, as is Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe (2005), which invokes Derrida’s
theory of hauntology and deals with the theme on a more global scale. The chapter ends
with a discussion of Kim Scott’s Benang (1999) which with comparative reference to
Toni Morrison’s Beloved, continues to discuss the relevance of themes of
postcolonialism, and literary postmodernism to contemporary conceptions of freedom.
Using Edward Said’s seminal theory as a point of embarkation, the third chapter
explores the use of orientalism (despite its recognised inadequacies) as an emancipatory
strategy in the familiar work of Emerson, Thoreau, and Kerouac. Having gained an
understanding of the intricacies of cross cultural borrowing, this chapter then moves
towards the possibility of an age of ‘post-orientalism’ and cultural hybridity in a
discussion of American author Maxine Hong Kingston’s novel Tripmaster Monkey
(1989) and Australian author Brian Castro’s novel After China (1992).
As in the first two chapters, the fourth chapter also begins its discussion of
Chinese freedom with an exploration of a folkloric figure of resistance and autonomy
through a reading of two of Jin Yong’s martial arts novels. The subsequent reemergence
of such figures in antiheroic form in Chinese fiction from the late 1980s onward is
reflective of the countercultural Zeitgeist evident in Wang Shuo’s Playing For Thrills
(1989). The chapter ends in a discussion of the recluse tradition as an alternative mode of
resistance in dissident writer Gao Xingjian’s Soul Mountain. Gao’s novel seems an
appropriate text to end with as accusations surrounding Gao’s apparent ‘Westernisation’
initiate interesting discussion regarding the ever more complicated nature of crosscultural
‘influence’ and to what extent a ‘pure’ cultural identity is possible in our current
age of globalisation.
My thesis explores the related questions of whether the commonalities found
between works from different cultures in relation to concepts of freedom are a result of
the homogenisation that is a consequence of the global age, whether they suggest
evidence of a certain humanistic universality, and whether there is perhaps enough
evidence for the maintenance of cultural specificity despite globalising trends. Ultimately
I believe my research provides evidence of what Roland Robertson has referred to as a
‘process involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the
particularization of universalism’.6 In doing so I believe it also illustrates the number of
ways in which contemporary works may fit within a broader context of ‘world literature’,
and provides an example of the international reading practice and intellectual projects
made possible by the realities of contemporary global informational technology. Despite
its provisional use of national categorization, it is a project that demonstrates the extent to
which literature has moved beyond national and linguistic boundaries, whether because
the local text borrows from the global in its attempt to reach a self-definition, because of
the international circulation of a particular work, or because of the cross-culturalism of an
author. | en |
