I. Context

1. Historical Background

  1) Two world wars

   -- direct result of the conflicts between rival imperialist countries and their ambition to dominate  the world

   -- deprived hundred millions of people’s lives

   -- literature in the 20th century: literature between the two  world wars (Modernism), and literature after World War II  (Postmodernism)

 2) Conflicts between old and new values

   -- departure from the conventional or established values

   -- affected by the sickness of fin de siecle (世纪末), and sped up   by the World War I

   -- sense of alienation and loneliness

 3) Testing of religious faith

   --scepticism and disillusionment (sense of nada)

  -- a chaotic world, a land of spiritual and emotional sterility

   --helpless before an incomprehensible world

2. Cultural Background

 1) The theory of evolution by Darwin

   --It reveals that humans had an animal, rather than divine or rational, nature.

 2) The theory of socialism by Marx

   --It shows that history was based on class conflict and that the  vast majority of workers were controlled by a small group of  people who owned the means of production and distribution.

3) The theory of Psycho-analysis by Freud

   -- Levels of mental life (Conscious, Unconscious: Individual unconscious, Collective unconscious)

   -- Structures of the mind (Ego, Id, Superego)

   -- Motivation-dynamics (Instincts: Life Instinct (Love),  Death Instinct (Destructive); Oedipus Complex; Electra Complex; Anxiety; Repression

   --All human actions are determined by libido (sexual desire) which people subconsciously suppress.

 4) Irrational philosophy

   --Rational philosophy: I think, therefore I am.

   --Irrational philosophy: I feel, therefore I am.

 5)  Arthur Schopenhauer

   --Humans are motivated by only their own basic desires, or “Will to Live”; human desires are futile, illogical, directionless, and so are all human actions in the world.

  6) Friedrich Nietzsche

   --Apollonian vs. Dionysian culture (Reason vs.Passion)

   --The Death of God

     » God dies when men realize they created God, and with  God’s death, also comes the death of Universal ideas and  Truths.

    » God’s death gives us Liberation from guilt, to be creative, to construct one’s own horizon, to follow your own will to  power

 --The Superman & His Will to Power

  7) Existentialism  

   Martin Heidegger

   Jean-paul Sartre

   --There is no God; for man,  existence precedes essence.

   --The world is absurd; life is full of sorrow.

   --As being-for-itself we are free; authentic people take  responsibility for their choices and actions.