英文摘要 |
Wang Guowei lived through the end of the Qing Dynasty and the early Republic. What he confronted in that era was not the conventional “dynasty change” but a whole new “revolution.” When he was forced to enter a modern era, he witnessed the collapse of existing values. A sense of crisis questioning “meanings” surging along as he experienced the modernity and the crisis. This paper intends to inspect Wang Guowei's activities concerning historical and geographical studies and explore his meditation between the collision of the East and the West as well as his efforts in building up theories after he confronted modernity. With the help of visual theories, this paper will make manifest Wang's emphasis on “seeing.” From a transcendent doctrine of “in the divine omniscient eyes, nothing distinguishes itself from others” to his failure of self-salvation when he claimed in his Songs of Ren-Jian —“I climb the highest peak to glimpse the bright moon. Oh! What a pity that I am no different from the men below,” this paper intends to reveal the amazement of the ultimate modern experience in the eyes of Wang. That's means Ren-Jian is both a purgatory and a Bodhimaṇḍa. His poetry inherited the legacy of conventional lyrics full of classical symbols while at the same time exposed the annihilate experiences, a gaze of death. By 1911, Wang Guowei had already experienced his “tri-transformation.” However, the divine omniscient eyes were fruitless, and emotions failed to succeed, and his subjectivity wandered off. Everything indicated that he was a lonely, nostalgic modern subject in search of something throughout his life. Therefore, his early activities concerning literature and history should not be regarded as a continuation of his old subject. Similarly, one should also consider his later achievements on historical and geographical textual studies based on certain modern experiences. |