The Relation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray to Postmodernism and Its Ambivalence

• Main Authors: Chia-Yu Chen, 陳佳妤
• Other Authors: I-Ming Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/21808975314121277797

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 英文學系碩士班 === 98 === The thesis attempts to demonstrate how the postmodernist practice and theory of literature give fruitful viewpoint on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray; also, the discussion and disclosure of the inconsistency and ambivalence of Wilde’s personality and novel can be explained in relation to postmodernist relativism. Chapter one applies to state how Wilde’s aestheticism contradicted the didactic and moralistic view of most Victorian critics’ expectation; further, it at the same time expounds Wilde’s doctrine of art for art’s sake. Chapter two explores that Wilde shares his resistance against the constraints of any intellectual system with postmodernist writers. The method of inversion and paradox serves to compare with the contemporary strategy of deconstruction. By reversing the relationship between life and art, Wilde’s paradoxes resemble the strategy of deconstruction. Chapter three presents Linda Hutcheon’s concepts in the essays with the characterization of postmodernist writings. Metafiction plays an important role in the postmodernist fore-grounds; according to her concepts, the reader becomes a collaborator in the literary process and resembles the creative process of the author. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, for instance, the Vane episode serves as a clever parody in which Wilde ridicules all realist and moralizing art. Like a postmodernist writer, Wilde is able to ridicule and parody the rigid realistic literary tradition of the Victorian age.