17 Years Of Literary Criticism In The Question Of The Legality

The 'integration' of Seventeen Years Literature (hereafter, SYL), mainly derived from the consistency of literature with politics, namely, the workings of literature in accordance with the political system, makes its legitimacy consolidation one of the central concerns of literary norms. As an embodiment of the norms, criticism, in constructing and justifying its legitimacy per se, holistically molds the literary world by resorting to support from political standards and propounding all sorts of trivial values and rules as required. These rules for legitimacy are actually in constant conflict with the demands for rationality in literary practice; as a result, the legitimacy model in SYL, generally speaking, overcomes the literary rationality, and in the final analysis the legitimacy per se is overturned.A crucial step to the setting of SYL norms is the 1st Conference of Representatives from Literature and Art (henceforth, 'L. & A.) Circles. The keynote speeches given by Zhou Yang and Mao Dun, theoretically based on the arguments advocated in 'Talks(at Yenan Forum on L. & A.)', re-interpret the L. A. in May Four periods, the conventions initiated by Lu Xun, and the L. & A. practiced in regions under the rule of the National Party, whereby the L. & A. in liberated regions is established as orthodox, and the tone and model for SYL criticism are set. Throughout this discourse, legitimacy is structured in the shape of an 'inverted pyramid': Political correspondence comes first, then values construction, and finally the recognition of literary practice. This line of thought invokes the disaffection of the writers from regions under the rule of the National Party, but also starts a divorce between SYL criticism and literary rationality.The institutionalization of L. & A. comes to intensify the conflict in value between political legitimacy and literary rationality. A chain of criticisms are leveled at the possibility of getting petty bourgeois involved, at the ways of dealing with policies or heroes, and at the tendency manifested in Between us husband and wife etc. The norm for literary criticism increasingly imposes severe constraints to writing as to its raw materials, its themes, its forms, and the authors' ideas, hence a stereotyped model concerning truth, the manifestations of essence, and the evaluation on works and writers. Owing to these compulsory requirements, literary creations are orientated towards formulism and conceptualism; with this trend, the criticism norms are thrown into doubt by literary practice.The lagging in literary practice is so much that it invites discontentment from all sides and even shakes up the legitimacy of the norms, which forces the norms to adjust themselves. In the 2nd Conference of Representatives from L. & A. Circles, Zhou Yang reasserts his socialistic realism in the hope of fighting against dogmatism, and yet his basic arguments retain strong similarity to the given norms. Feng Xuefeng's advocating of realism against subjectivism highlights the importance of authenticity and archetype in literary creations, thus leaving more room for literarypractice. Hu Feng, however, feels an need to rebuild a literary system on the basis of the demands from literary practice and of the abandonment of narrow-minded factional literary norms.With the emergence of "Double Hundreds" (Let a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend), literary rationality obviously enjoys much more freedom. There arises a reflective current of negation, a criticizing of the notion of socialistic realism, of dogmatic tendency, and even of the literary norms; there occurs the spreading of conceptions like 'the opening up of a path of realism' and 'the human nature of literature', namely, a wish for the consistency between political requirements and literary practice. And the literary norms suffer a crisis over legitimacy. Despite this crisis, political norms still play a significant role in the rebuilding of legitimate literary norms.From 1958 onward the rising of mass L. & A. tides a...