From Peasant To Peasant-worker

The research object of this dissertation is the rural writings, with the mainpurpose of, by analyzing the core texts, exploring how and why the literature inresponse to the great change of the country from the1990’s and what questionsand meanings it presents, and therefore make the texts research really involvingin the discussion on the country questions. This dissertation tries to use atransdisciplinary research method, and make a break through existing researchmode. Thus the literature texts about rural writings from the1990’s are debatedas the field on the questions of the country and peasant. So, not only thecharacters, story lines in the literature texts, but also the program of narrativeand the rhetorical devices that used in the texts, and social issues presented bythe story lines should be brought into the scope of discussion, that way, thediscussion will not be limited completely in the minor literature unto the worksthemselves, but the great literature that involved the historical context thatproduces the text, meaning structure and the system of the interpretation.The specific writing of this dissertation revolves around the basic ideas of"from peasant to peasant-worker", and the structure of the dissertation consistsof grasping some of the key concepts or writing objects in the ruralwritings---village, women peasant-workers, young peasant-workers, andspreading out discussion from the core texts selected in each chapter. In short,this paper put the1980’s rural stories as the pre-history, then combines withthe rural writings from the1990’s, liquidate a narrative context about "frompeasant to peasant-worker". In the study of this context, we can see more clearlythat how the country world of "self-sufficient" was broken by a new historicallogic characterized by "urbanization", and how the peasants were obliged to bedivorced from the country community and became "the human resources" thatneeded by "the logic of market". As a result, we seem to see that the literary writings about rural writings move towards the "elegy" type of narrative sincethen. But this paper doesn’t think so, the seemingly elegy type of narrativecontains actually more complexities and tensions. The writers, in a sense, withthis elegy type of narrative, guide us to listen to the own voice made hard by thecountry/peasants. In other words, although the literary narrative of "frompeasant to peasant-worker" has some sentiment, it’s not lack of, in a sense, newhope. Obviously, this is not an imagination of the literature’s own wishfulthinking, but, in a sense, a more living reality.This dissertation thus is divided into four chapters. The research object inchapter one is country story in the literature of1980’s. The literary narrativefrom the early to the middle and later periods of the1980’s, contains exactly acomplete set of narrative logic which shows us how the traditional country orderstructure was destroyed, and this is just about the origin of the country stories inthe1990’s. Chapter two expounds around the literary imagination of "thevillage"."The decaying village" in some degree has been a universal form of thevillages in the1990’s literature, and "the empty-shelled village" is theconcentrate expression to "decay", which contains the writers’ holisticrepresentation and the reflection of the country from the1990’s."Theempty-shelled " used here is more of a metaphor which refer to the empty ofthe cultural level of the village, such as the transformation of the power structure,the collapse of traditional value conception and so on. The research object inchapter three is the narrative of women peasant-workers in literature. This isnot only because women peasant-workers concentrate on presenting thedilemma that peasant-workers encounter during the process of urbanization,but also be more obvious connected with the tendency of writings about womenpeasant-workers. One of the basic judgments is that the writings about womenpeasant-workers from the1990’s mostly have the interwovenness connectionwith "sex" or "body". This chapter, therefore, aims at discussing that why literature imagines women peasant-workers like this, and that what problemsthis writings might have. Chapter four spreads out discussion of the literarynarrative on "young peasant-workers" i.e. the new generation peasant-workers,with the purpose of exploring why young peasant-workers were describedfrequently as violent youth in literature, a violence that unto both others andthemselves. The "violence" here, in a sense, has a strong metaphor whichsymbolizes "the resistance of the weakness". In this sense, this kind of literarywritings then have some significance of "political writing".