Abstract—This study aims to investigate the relationship between ‘Revolution’, ‘Love’ and ‘Discourse’ in ‘Hard as Water’ by means of close reading. It is found that ‘Hard as Water’, different from previous ‘Revolution and Love’ novels, deconstructed the dualistic framework of ‘Revolution’ and ‘Love’ by adding ‘Discourse’ as a new dominant factor into the novel. Instead of criticizing the ‘Cultural Revolution’ directly with the method of highlighting the passionate ‘Love’ as the symbol of humanity liberation, ‘Hard as Water’ constructed an unstable society under the reign of ‘revolution discourse’, which exposed the absurdity of revolution discourse and thereby went a step further in introspecting the mistakes made by the ‘Cultural Revolution’.
Index Terms—Deconstruction, discourse, love, revolution.
The authors are with huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China (e-mail: caoyifan@hust.edu.cn, tianqihe5-c@my.cityu.edu.hk, wangyi@hust.edu.cn).
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Cite:Yifan Cao, Tianqi He, and Yi Wang, "Revolution, Love and Discourse: On Yan Lianke‟s „Hard as Water‟," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 31-40, 2020.