Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.4, 2021

 

The Aesthetics of Dong Xi’s Fiction Texts: From A Slap on the Face to Echoes

(Abstract)

 

Wu Jun

 

From A Slap on the Face to Echoes (Huixiang), Dong Xi’s novels embody complex textual characteristics, including metaphor, intertextuality, deconstruction, drama, parody and other aesthetic constructions and realms. Throughout his career, Dong Xi has a persistent and unique pursuit of the narrative aesthetics of fiction, a pursuit that stems from his holistic thinking about narrative content and narrative position. What he wants to create is a kind of narrative text that can trigger in its reception a mechanism of the reproduction of meanings. In Echoes, The delicate description of marital life and emotional entanglement, and the deep and extensive excavation of the psychological game and self-entanglement among the characters, present a metaphorical text with the reality of life experience, which not only surpasses Dong Xi’s own previous works, but also has a unique significance in contemporary literature.