The Stream Of Human Nature Purifies The Spirit-the Dissertation On Humanism Of Sun Li And His Works

Throughout the Chinese literary history of the twentieth century, Sun Li is a case to be reckoned with unique features, which cannot be ignored. As a mainstream writer under the mainstream politics, Sun Li moderately coordinated the two literary standards of being both political and artistic, so that his works are characteristic of both the revolution literature and the liberalism literature. Specifically, he showed his obedience to and responded to the mainstream arts policy, while maintaining a relatively independent personality in literary creation. His works always give readers a unique aesthetic experience and immerse readers in humanistic warmth.Researchers have been long focusing on the beauty of human nature and the beauty of human love highlighted in Sun Li’s works. Literature is a human science and it carries the mission to reveal the universal humanity. Literature inspires readers by showing the beauty of human nature and gives alert by exposing and criticizing the evil of human nature. Literature leads people to have "the fervent yearning and the lofty ideals of improving human life to the perfection of kindness and beauty". In my opinion the reason why Sun Li and his works get more and more attention and esteem in the field of literary studies and all the other walks of life rooted in that he partly discarded the ideological discourse based on social classes, and insisted on the creation by humanitarian discourse of human nature theory.Sun Li’s works are true to feeling, gentle and amiable in character creation, aesthetic quality and narrative language because they are marked with the stigma of humanity. Different from the previous studies focusing only on the text or only on the writer, this paper guided by the "humanitarianism of human nature theory", with Sun Li’s personality cultivation, knowledge heritage, life experience as the source, Sun Li’s works, interviews, letters, etc. as the basis, compares Sun Li’s works with those of writers of the same ranks who share a similar style. In this way, this paper probes into why Sun Li’s works are still able to have the power of moving as ever through different historical periods.This paper is divided into three parts, with each part focusing on the writer ontology, text study, and comparative study of writers, with introduction and conclusion.The first part is the writer ontology. Sun Li advocated equality, and expected the elimination of unfairness between people. Sun Li is himself a man with love, compassion, sincerity and other typical humanitarian characteristics. The first part probes into the reality basis of Sun Li’s humanitarian literary thought from the writer ontological point of view. This part reveals the spiritual world of Sun Li as an individual as well as his mentality of choice as a writer.Chapter One elucidates the key concepts of this thesis, including "the theory of human nature" and "humanitarianism". The fist part of Chapter One compares the viewpoint of humanity in the western world with that in China and reveals the affinity between literature and humanity, which lays a theoretical foundation for the analysis of the humanity charm in the process of Sun Li’s literary creation. The second part of Chapter One reviews the historical origin of humanitarianism and emphasizes the introduction to the development process of the humanitarianism in literature around China.Chapter Two analyzes the two reasons for the formation of Sun Li’s humanitarian thoughts according to his educational background and life experience. At first, Sun Li was born in a peasants’family with strong peasant mentality. He depended on his hometown and his own family heavily in spirit, which played a very important part in the formation of his character. Furthermore, his harmonious family filled with love made him endowed with kindness and his idea of "the same structure of the clan and the country" let him look forward to the realization of a democratic society in which all men are equal. Secondly, Sun Li learnt a lot about Chinese classical literature, the "May Fourth" new-vernacular literature and the social science in the western world. Therefore he was almost not influenced by the negative part of feudal thought. His structure of knowledge was rich in humanitarian thought. His view of life and way of creation changed owing to the variation of his health condition and the social environment during his twilight years. In this thesis, the writer tried to analyze the reasons why Sun Li’s ideological system of humanitarianism was improved in his middle and old age according to his medical history and his performance during the Cultural Revolution.Chapter Three discusses Sun Li’s personality with paradox influenced by humanitarianism and summarizes it as follows:sincerity without self-indulgence, solitariness without arrogance, and equanimity without retiracy, which results in some limitation in Sun Li’s personality. Literary works reflect the personality of the authors, so the works by Sun Li presents the uniqueness of his personality. The paradox in Sun Li’s personality limits the profundity of his words but balance the political and literary features of literature, which gives his works the practical and aesthetic values and makes him a quite special writer in the mainstream literature. Humanitarianism plays a significant role in the formation of his personality, and his character reflects several humanistic thoughts, such as sincerity, compassion, helpfulness, and sympathy, etc.The middle part is based on Sun’s works. Sun Li once said "All that are impressive, such as my major experiences and the main features of age, are almost put into my articles. Some are prose, some are memoirs and some are novels." To fully understand his humanitarianism thoughts we need to analyze thoroughly his literary works.Chapter4mainly discusses Sun’s Water Complex and Water Images in his writings. Readers can easily find typical Complexes on Water, Female, Hometown, Childhood, and that of Anti-Japanese. The fact that Sun described lakes, rivers and waters in his writing especially before the mid-1960s, proves the unconscious Hometown Complex, the Harmony Theory, as well as his Pursuit of Truth and Beauty. Water Images, almost appearing in all Sun’s writings, therefore, can be taken as a window through which to peer Sun’s mental world, and a key to open the door into Sun’s literary creation.Chapter5deals with Female Images in Sun’s works. Sun has a preferable love for females, and is an expert on writing about females, for he sees the goodness and eminence in that very group. Focusing on their personal feelings during the special years, Sun depicts females as brave, optimistic, gentle, considerate, as well as with other traditional values, getting independent in war time. Meanwhile, the females bravely go after love and are loyal to their marriage, knowing their lovers when they are kids or coming in love in time. All prove Sun’s search for the rich human emotion world, regarding females as the image of beauty and kindness. In his writings, however, there are also signs of Male chauvinism, such as the over-idealization of female images and being intolerable to their weaknesses.In the sixth chapter, the author discusses that Sun Li completes the writing of the human and humanitarian in literary creation by means of realism method. Sun Li not only sticks to the realistic principle and the method strictly in the creation, but also explores and integrates the realism theory. Sun Li’s realistic literary route is realized by the humanitarian, pursuing truth, kindness, beauty. Literature research writers and the party’s literary policy have a certain influence on his realistic creation methods. Sun Li emphasizes that realism method affects moral education and the political propaganda deeply by means of realism literature, so his literary ideology of realism is intertwined with utilitarianism.What the seventh chapter discusses is that how the stretching force of enlightening modernity and aesthetic modernity is embodied by Sun Li and his literary creations. The desire for establishing a modern country and the rational support for tools hinted in Sun Li and his works reflect the distinct characteristics of enlightening modernity, but there also is a rejection for market economic system of modern country in his works. Sun Li and his works have criticized unjust policies which would inhibit the sense of liberty and happiness of common people. The showing of his caring and sympathy for the living conditions of those who have been oppressed and harmed indicates the evident aesthetic modernity. But Sun Li objects to the artists who express aesthetic modernity intensively. Therefore, though insinuated in Sun Li’s behavior and his literary creation, the modernized spirit is not conveyed such perfectly as it deserves to be.In part3, the author makes a comparing research on the writers, which is exploring the literary writers group that is in the same literary camp, similar writing style with Sun Li. Other authors, who are modeled after Sun Li, can be investigated equally. This way contributes to have a relatively clear watch for the writer’s status and influence in the coordinate system, and help for a more objective evaluation of the literature history.In Chapter8, a comparison is done between Sun Li and Shen Congwen, who had the similar literature style with each other. The author analyzes their humanitarianism pursuits in common, and investigates the change of comments on Shen Congwen’s literature history as well. A discussion on the feminization in Sun Li and Shen Congwen’s works is also presented in this chapter.The ninth chapter aims to prominent Sun’s distinct creative writing, which contains his full energy to the investigation of the human nature and feelings. Thus, basing on the writing style and the evaluation of the literature history, the comparison between Sun Li and Zhao Shuli, one of the representative authors in the liberated area, as well as Ding Ling, is indeed an effective way to achieve this goal. First, we can find the masterpieces of Zhao Shuli are typical of distinctive mask of time and peasant language style through organizing the evaluation he received from circles of the different historic period. Works written by Sun Li are different with articles of Zhao Shuli, for Sun’s works express the time-uncontrolled power of the human nature, poetically. Next, through organizing Ding Ling’s the creative process, her writing style has a immense change,for her charming writings in the early stage had been regularized by revolutionary discourse. Compared with Ding Ling, Sun Li is still keeping his creative principle which pursuit the beautiful human nature. Following mind, he searches for suitable requirements existing in the humanity, class nature, as well as times.In Chapter10, the author studies the writing characteristics of some writers who either belonged to Hehuadian School formed under the influence of Sun Li or grew up as young accomplished writers with Sun’s help. Sun Li has never confessed the existence of Hehuadian School, though, a number of younger writers like Liu Shaotang, Cong Weixi, Fang Shumin, and even Tie Ning and Jia Pingwa on the periphery of this school, received Sun’s guidance and help during their writing journey. Thus, they were fully aware of Sun Li’s literature writing essence. As a result, they emulated Sun Li’s writing style as trying to make their works fresh and elegant, to create their writings based on realism, to keep an eye on finding out the beauty of rural life, and to be skilled in portraying the charm of human natures and relationships. Simultaneously, they made improvements based on it as expanding their writings into more aspects of people’s lives. As a senior influential contemporary Chinese writer, carrying forward the selfless humanitarian spirit, Sun Li shared his precious writing experience and literature theories with younger writers through interviews and letters, in which he taught them the principles of both being a writer and being human. A batch of accomplished young Chinese writers deeply influenced by Sun Li has gradually become the backbone of Chinese contemporary literature.Sun Li still received constant wide acclaim from mainstream values although he had been living through different times of political history and various literary development periods. What’s more, the evaluation on his role in literature history is improving. It is very rare to have such permanent artistic vitality, compared with other Chinese writers in the other revolutionary districts. Thus, the exploration of the "Sun Li" phenomenon has significant meanings to literary history, literary theory and aesthetics. In addition, through the case study of Sun Li, the barriers between modern literature and contemporary literature can be got through, the artistic purports of these two types of literature can be observed, and the process of achieving literary classics can be traced. Working on this program, we can find out what kind of concept of creation we may insist on to make literature works with new connotation, which has certain implications for both literary writings and literary critics. Possessing brilliant humanism morality, Sun Li set a positive example in both contemporary literature area and society which had been eroded partly by the tendency of moral anomie at that time.