The objective of this exegesis is to show how linguistic and cultural hybridity create a unique prose style, and how my stories sit within that style. I will use Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin to demonstrate the distinctive narrative techniques. These include the use of sensuous details (instead of descriptions) to make place and character palpable; dialogue that convincingly evokes living speech; plots which emanate from the characters, rather than the other way round; and open-ended resolutions, as in real life. I will then show how I use these narrative techniques in my collection Happiness and other stories. The collection of stories is embargoed until 31 March 2012.

The thesis mainly discusses the hermeneutic system on Du Fu¡¦s poetics, which was established after close analysis of Du Fu¡¦s poetry by a literary critic Chin Sheng-Tang (the end of the Ming and beginning of the Qing dynasties).Among all Tang poets Chin Sheng-Tang admired Du Fu the most for his poetics of seven line stanzas, which was viewed by Chin Sheng-Tang as an epitome of high aesthetical value and poetical canon. The critic proposed a method of decompositional analysis for studying Du Fu¡¦s poetry: he saw the interconnection between the title of the poem and it¡¦s content, and then decomposed the poem into small pieces, conducting close reading, so that the poem was seen as having three level structure from bigger to smaller ¡¥the level of passages, sentences and characters¡¦. First, we start with looking at ¡¥other interpretation¡¦ from the describing trend of hermeneutics on Du Fu¡¦s poetics prevailing during that period of time, pointing out what was the main opinion of the literary critics, and comparing it with the one of Chin Sheng-Tang¡¦s, and looking at his status among the circles of literary critics. Then we discuss the Chin Sheng-Tang ¡¥s ¡¥self interpretation¡¦ , explaining what kind of reader and critic he was. After that we provide the review of poetry reading methods and horizon in literary criticism, explaining how to use the method in literary analysis. After Chin Sheng-Tang¡¦s method of literary criticism becomes clear to us, we look how his caesura method is used to analyze structure of Du Fu¡¦s poetry. Through the caesura analysis we use reader¡¦s, author¡¦s and literary works point of view to find out whether this method is appropriate and whether it can reveal the spirit of that age or is it simply an over-reading. In the end we provide the conclusion about the effectiveness of the hermeneutic system, proposed by Chin Sheng-Tang.

The objective of this exegesis is to show how linguistic and cultural hybridity create a unique prose style, and how my stories sit within that style. I will use Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin to demonstrate the distinctive narrative techniques. These include the use of sensuous details (instead of descriptions) to make place and character palpable; dialogue that convincingly evokes living speech; plots which emanate from the characters, rather than the other way round; and open-ended resolutions, as in real life. I will then show how I use these narrative techniques in my collection Happiness and other stories.

The objective of this exegesis is to show how linguistic and cultural hybridity create a unique prose style, and how my stories sit within that style. I will use Grace Paley and Lucia Berlin to demonstrate the distinctive narrative techniques. These include the use of sensuous details (instead of descriptions) to make place and character palpable; dialogue that convincingly evokes living speech; plots which emanate from the characters, rather than the other way round; and open-ended resolutions, as in real life. I will then show how I use these narrative techniques in my collection Happiness and other stories. The collection of stories is embargoed until 31 March 2012.