The Study On Restructure Of The Theory Of Human Nature In The New Era Literature(1979-1987)

Named as the “New Era”, the 1980 s is of great importance as it is the historical intermediary connecting two 30 years. Similar to other major historical climacterics, the “New Era” was accompanied with transitions in several essential key words, themes, discourses, ideas and ideologies. The transition in the theory of human nature constitutes the point of penetration and basic clue of our understanding of the literature and politics in the “New Era” and the relationship between them. The imagination and practice of literature and politics must answer the question “what is human being”.In order to historically and theoretically understand the restruction in the theory of human nature in the “New Era” literature, we must clearly define the historical meaning of the “New Era”—the ending of the revolution and the beginning of the reform. In terms of both time and space, both rural/agricultural reform and urban/industrial reform signify the two stages, two facets and two clues of the reform in the “New Era”. Besides, they contain different narrative possibilities and imaginations of human nature.Responding to the historical practice and narration of the co-operation transformation, rural reform novels returned to the pattern of land reform, differentiated and appropriated historical images of two types of small producers, retold the small producers’ fortune dreams buried during the past 30 years, and proved the legitimacy of the reform. Politics was stigmatized and the market gradually became the space to maintain the natural human nature. In more radical narrations, “natural person” and “homo politicus” in revolution period, through class struggle, degraded to the bare life. By means of the reform through labor and the revitalization of the market, they ascended again to the new figures of “homo economicus”. Although the “New Era” writers attempted to maintain the narrative limits of the market and “homo economicus”, the development of history and logic led to expansion of the scale of market and the replacement of use value by exchange value, and hence the birth of the new men of the bourgeoisie. Rather ironically, this was the result of the “enlightenment” in the “New Era”.Industrial reform novels dealt with the issues of the new men in socialized mass production. In the socialist industrial novels, due to the intervention of the “Angang Constitution”, a political mobilization structure of interaction between management layer and basement layer was revealed, and the subjectivity of working class was dynamically formed within. Reform novels exposed themselves to a management age characterized with de-politicization, in which the intervention of the scientific management led to the loss of possibility of the interaction between the two layers. In the management layer, the technical bureaucrat replaces the political one; in the basement layer, the working class gradually became de-politicized and disciplined to qualified labor adapted to the new relations of production. Though reform novels endeavored to motivate anew the historical energy of “both red and expert” new socialist men through the image of the managers, they failed to avoid the structural crisis caused by de-politicization.