英文摘要
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To overcome the present crisis of conditions of knowledge, an effort to re-conceptualize, position and identify the shared experiences of the Third World is perhaps an intellectual project which is worth undertaking but under explored. In the past half century, Chen Yingzhen's thought and literature, having accumulated a body of work surrounding Third World subjectivity, have become extremely rich intellectual resources for us to study. This essay first traces Chen's discourse on the Third World, and then proceeds to analyze his three novels on the lunatics, the madman, and the mental patient, with a motive to begin to enter the mental conditions in the post War Third World. Engaging with his work as a whole, I come to the conviction that Chen's understanding of the Third World is, after all, grounded in his struggle with, his documentation of, his pondering over, and his writing of the immediate social environment within which he has lived; and therefore, his solidarity and identification with the Third World is an internal or immanent relation. If the attempt to reconstruct the Third World as a main reference system of thought is to be realized, we will need to continue to explore and to mark out the highly heterogeneous trajectories of the history of the mental conditions, so that we can more properly come to terms with the conditions of our present from which to imagine the future.
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