Confucian Cultural Expressions In Mao Dun Literature Award Winnings

From the first Mao Dun Literature Award winnings to be produced in1982so far, Mao Dun Award can be said that it is synchronous with the development process of the new period literature. As the only national novel award, though its previous winnings are not able to meet people's expectations, even with much controversy and doubts, the development of Mao Dun Literature Award, its winnings and controversy around it together can be said to be a living development history of the new period literature. Both from the point of view to promote the development of Mao Dun Literature Award and the development of literature in all period, it is sufficient to investigators to have a detailed investigation and research. For Mao Dun Literature Award's research, the more limited to its award system and the aesthetic characteristics reflected in the winnings, this paper tried to explore the Confucian culture expectations in Mao Dun Literature Award winnings from the perspective of culture. In fact, we are more willing to see Mao Dun Literature award as a miniature of the development process of new period literature, thus to see Confucian cultural performance, reflecting, consistency or some kind of diversification in the field of each subject of contemporary literature in the long development history. In other words, we will see the expectations, state and modern transformation of Confucian culture in contemporary literature through the research of Mao Dun Literature Award winnings. The construction of modern culture is inseparable from the outstanding achievements of the traditional culture.In the introduction section, besides a brief introduction of the present study of Mao Dun Literature Award, we will have a general discussion of the Confucian culture expectation as the study point, the contemporary situation of Confucian culture as well as writers and readers to see the impact of Confucian culture on the Mao Dun Literature Award winnings. Confucian culture as the mainstream of traditional Chinese culture has been profoundly affected our way of life and emotional experience, but we have always paid more attention to the relationship between modern literature and Confucian cultural tradition and less to this factor in the contemporary literature. From the deep psychology, cultural hot in1980s and1990s is the reflection of contemporary cultural workers'double anxiety of modernization and national identity. It that intellectual suffering consciousness, political psychology and reader's reading expectation shaped by Confucian cultural tradition has a great relationship with the temporal spirit, realistic character and ideology that Mao Dun Literature award works showed.In the first chapter, we will explore the root of traditional culture that award winnings expressed, the performance of "kindheartedness and justice" which is the core spirit of Confucian culture and rational reflection to it. The roots of traditional culture are discussed from three aspects. First, award-winnings work on the construction of a common national history which constructed our common historical imagination and constructed identity, belonging and a sense of history of our political identity and national identity. Second, award-winnings focus on the performance of the local customs and regional culture with the use of language, and which tend to load the complex emotions of identity or reflection of writers to traditional cultural. The third that is also the most important one is mining the national spirit. The thought of "kindheartedness and justice" have a major impact on our national character and it forms the traditional virtues of the nation. Many works show the dual nature of "virtue" on the characters due to the internal contradictions of Confucian culture. In this section, our rational reflection of "virtue" will focus on the writers themselves who advocate the humanitarian spirit, we will see that they show some kind of one-sidedness and the one-sided caused the unequal attitude of the writers to shape characters.The second chapter focuses on representative works of Mao Dun award-winnings in a variety of topics and we will discuss the different attitude and understanding to traditional Confucian culture in the process of modernization that writers showed in their works. In reform novel, writers wrote more block aspect that Confucian culture made on modernization, for example Heavy Wings and Heroic Age. But Heroic Age also expressed that China's socialist modernization will inevitably need to absorb the outstanding factor of the Confucian cultural tradition. Rural novels such as White Deer Land and Shaanxi Opera paid more emphasis on the Chinese Confucian culture, and in which writers wrote the decline of Confucian culture under modern extrusion, the great vitality of it and their confusion. The Right Band of The Argun related to the major relation between the traditional culture and the convert of human mind. In a word, writers put more complex emotion in rural novels, not only showed more warmth of respect to Confucian culture but also have been aware of its inevitable decline fate with the irresistible of modernization and its all evil. So we can see that the writers have different theme apace carry different cultural value.The third chapter analyses the essence spirit of Confucian culture expressed in the award-winnings. That the spirit of Confucian culture mainly reflected through the characters so we divided the figures into four types in according to their main spirit:revolutionary heroes with patriotism, ordinary people with essential thought of kindheartedness and justice, reformers who devote themselves to the public interests and intellectuals. In this chapter, besides a holistic recognition to the cultural spirit expressed on these types of characters, we will put more emphasis on scholars and intellectuals by analyzing these novels:Zhang Juzheng, Willow in White Gate, East Harbor and You Are in The Highland. As the creator, maintainer and disseminator of knowledge and values, scholars and intellectuals most fully embody the culture spirit of an era, through which we can see how writers write and contemplation the essence of the spirit of Confucian culture.The forth chapter takes the introspection literature and reform novel which based on the value of modernization and are a kind of imagination and writing of China's modernization process as its research topics. Here, we will discuss how traditional Confucian ethical and political thinking affects the writers'imagination of the modern. In these novels, ethical legitimacy is isomorphism with rationality of society and characters and ethical and political thinking acts a side effect on writers' profound performance and understanding to modernization process which lead to some moral idealism in these novels. And this also makes the national imagination inevitably have a color of utopia. We also see that ethical and political thinking mode lead to biased and lack of human modernization by analyzing the two aspects: one is male value position and male standard in gender relations in shaping the image of women and the other is the lack of personal ethical and legal awareness in the shaping of people.The fifth chapter discusses women writers' works in award-winnings, in which, the women writers show an attitude of subversion and contradictions to the traditional Confucian ethics. The first section discusses the female consciousness in women writers'works from three-point——the mold of female subject image, question to the traditional rules,"femininity" spontaneously revealed in style. In section2, we will discuss Without Words and Everlasting Regret written respectively by Zhang Jie and Wang An-yi, through which we will see their subversion to traditional Confucian ethics and contradiction in the subconscious. It tells us that women writers can not get rid of the influence of male discourse.Last section gives a brief analysis of the criticism that the award-winnings works on Confucian culture.