“Brocade in Ashes” (Jinhuidui) and “Patchwork Garment” (Bainayi): Cultural Memory and Identity Reconstruction through Textile Fragments in Contemporary Literature
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Abstract
This study investigates the dual role of textiles in literary discourse as both material artifacts and symbolic carriers, systematically examining their functions in narrative development, cultural memory preservation, and identity reconstruction. Through comparative textual analysis of modern and contemporary Chinese literature, the research explores how textile representations encode social meanings and aesthetic values while shaping character identity and historical consciousness. Particular attention is devoted to the narrative evolution of the traditional artistic concepts of Jinhuidui (Brocade in Ashes) and Bainayi (Patchwork Garment), whose fragment-based compositional logic provides a distinctive framework for reconstructing cultural memory through textile imagery. The findings demonstrate that literary depictions of textiles and sartorial culture enable writers to articulate complex personalities, social hierarchies, and symbolic identities within multilayered cultural contexts. By establishing a dialectical relationship between textile fragments and their narrative symbolism, the study further reveals how fragmented structures can be reorganized into coherent semantic systems. Beyond literary interpretation, this analytical framework offers methodological insights into hierarchical pattern representation, information encoding, and structured symbolic transmission, providing potential reference for digital cultural modeling and computational approaches to complex pattern organization relevant to intelligent engineering and electromagnetic information representation.
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