Reflection Of The Pioneer Of The Contemporary Avant-garde Literature

The mid-1980s Chinese literature has marked its splendid traces in the immense literary history to a certain extent, in which the avant-garde literature, like glorious spring sun, brightened up the long gloomy Chinese literature and the dried eyes of the readers. In its specific historical and cultural discourses, the avant-garde literature displayed its unique properties with rebellious vitality and pompous, gorgeous fashions. Its rising and thriving are ascribed to its retaining of the essential property of avant-gardeness in both its narrative methods and strategies and its language style and representation modality. The avant-garde literature continuously constructed, established and strengthened its avant-gardeness with a free and transcendental cultural spirit fraught with criticism, antagonism, challenge and innovation confronting both the authorities, the orthodox and the centralization and canonicity. However, the avant-garde literature"both thrived due to its avant-gardeness and perished due to its avant-gardeness". It fleeted in the Chinese contemporary literary history like a flash in the pan. In the 1990s, ineluctable variation, dormancy and transformation occurred inside the avant-gardes, which was not only closely connected to the overflow of consumerism, the lostness of creative subjectivities and the diversion of popular aesthetics, but was crucially due to its loss of avant-gardeness.There have been numerous studies on the avant-garde literature, from the initial general review and criticism to the further interpretation and artistic assessment, and then to the comprehensive exploration and systematic investigation of the avant-garde literature as a whole, which displayed an ever deepening and widening process. However, with the silence of the avant-garde literature for many years, the studies on it dwindled, in which very few studies took its avant-gardeness as the essential basis for the exploration. This article cuts in the investigation and reflection on the avant-garde literature with its avant-gardeness as the entry point and the kernel, with an attempt to generalize out the formation, evolvement, dormancy and transformation processes of the contemporary Chinese avant-garde literature by conducting a scrutiny of texts and scanning of the present specific conditions, an in-depth analysis on the historical and cultural backgrounds of the thriving and declining of it, and a deep reflection on it from the cultural, literary and cognitive theoretical aspects, thus exploring the values of avant-gardeness in the avant-garde literature and the present literary composition and exploration. This is the intention of this article.