The Mirage of Orality in the Contemporary Chinese Novel

The dialectal orality that has recently invested fictional production in China has renewed the debates on the relationship between literary works and the linguistic community. This study aims at reconsidering the continuing tensions between a literary field aspiring to autonomy and language norms dictated by political, ideological or economic imperatives of the Nation-State. We seek to show how writers are re-appropriating the vernacular language in order to preserve their creative subjectivity in their negotiation with the system.