Molt And Flight

Poverty has always been a pivotal issue in both China's history and reality. As has been evidenced in voluminous historical data, Poverty has existed in Chinese people's social lives for centuries, making great contributions to the construction of China's social status quo. It manipulates the orderly life cycle of'the societal country'and turns out to be one of the dominating forces in shaping the'characteristic'of the Chinese nation. Poverty has found its way into literature for a long time, as can be demonstrated in such profound Poverty-themed works as'killing the rich to save the poor'and'the peddler takes upper hand'. It is worth noting that Poverty has been an even more inseparable motif in the history of new-period literature.Lao She is a writer who has grown up in the small Hutong (alley) of Beijing. Having undergone a poor and tough life, he himself experienced the happiness, bitterness and painstakings of the lower-class citizens, keeping keen eyesight on the wretched life and tragic fate of the poor people living in the multi-household compound. Based on his childhood experiences, Lao She creates a lively world of Poverty in which he depicts the poor people's material life, and more remarkably, he portrays sympathetically their spiritual world and cultural structure, manifesting his emotional awareness and aesthetic tendency of a civilian writer and sticking to his obligation to deliver the civilian consciousness. Nonetheless, Lao She is not subject to the monotonous civilian ideology; instead, he manages to transcend the world of Poverty in his childhood and absorb the nutrition from both the traditional spirit of Chinese intellectuals on the one hand and Western modern civilization on the other. As a writer with modernity in life conscience and selfhood awareness, Lao She contemplates and criticizes in modern alertness the Chinese traditional culture, people's servile life and their civilian and submitting mentality. Meanwhile, he is by no means a by-stander or a critic; instead he maintains an intimate relation with the world of Poverty in which he roots his life and encompasses the brilliant figures of his childhood, his families, his neighbors and his friends; thereby, he is more capable of describing the world of Poverty in a vivid, detailed and sincere way than anyone else.Based on a close reading of texts, this dissertation conducts a value analysis and an evaluation of aesthetic sociology to Lao She's childhood experience and the world of Poverty presented in his works from the perspective of the literary sociology. The methodologies adopted in this dissertation are cultural philosophical criticism, historical criticism and epistemic archeology, etc.The dissertation consists of three parts, the introduction, the body of five chapters and the conclusion.The introduction expounds the influences of Lao She's childhood experience on his writing psychology, on the basis of which the dissertation proposes that Lao She's childhood life has exerted an impact on his growth and the literary writing. The objective of the study, the research question, the perspective, the methodology and the tenet of value are also formulated in this part.Chapter One surveys the picture of Lao She's childhood in the narratives about Lao She. On the one hand, Lao She, an expert of depicting himself in his own works, always introduces and analyzes himself in a straightforward presentation of'what I am like', which provides the most direct means to access his childhood life. On the other hand, owing to his worldwide fame as a giant writer of the 20th century Chinese literature, his childhood experience has been recurrent in the works of his families, his friends and the scholars who study Lao She, which has become another significant source for the researches of the formation and development of Lao she's thought. History and the literature are of'intertextual'relationship that they prove and confirm each other rather than that one determines or reflects the other. It is the case that the real past can be discovered in a literary narration, nonetheless, the history in literary accounts is inevitably ornamented and exaggerated, which calls for the disregard of the narrator's subjective intentions and the pursuit of the authentic historical data so as to avoid the presupposed trap set by the narrator. As such, fitting together Lao She's childhood from the literary narration is indispensable to the restoration of the his childhood life.Chapter Two investigates Lao She's childhood life in terms of sociological records. As Karl Max has said,'the substance of the human being is not inherent abstracts of an individual, but the sum of all the social relations in reality'. In this sense, Lao She's childhood is not an isolated and static life of his own, but it manifests the growth of childhood experience of an ordinary Peking citizen of Manchu descent in a civilian community during the late Qing Dynasty and the early Min Guo Period. This chapter focuses on restoring the social environment and changes of Qi people's life in Lao She's childhood in this particular historical period, aiming to verify the authenticity of Lao She's childhood in literary narrations and survey the growth of Lao She's childhood in this turbulent time. It is assumed that Lao She retains an intimate relation with his environment on the one hand and keeps an eye on it on the other. The feature of'free inlet and outlet'in Lao She's works contributes much to the high level of Lao She's works.Chapter Three explores the impact of Poverty as the mark of Lao She's childhood life. Poverty, which has been ironed in Lao She's childhood experience as a special taste of life, provides him with abundant writing materials, exerts a profound influence on his life orientation and plays implicitly or explicitly a part in his future writing and life choices. On the one hand, the Poverty experienced by Lao She in his childhood is no different than that experienced by other poor people; nonetheless, it has its own'delicate scale'which makes the magnificence of his life and his works. On the other hand, the impact of'being fatherless'in his poor childhood life on his life choices and writing is elaborated in this chapter. Through his painstaking life, Lao She has abstracted distinguished poetic images and developed a compassionate disposition.Chapter Four discusses the world of Poverty manifested in Lao She's works. Being born to a poor family, Lao She is privileged to access a community of poor people instead of some particular ones. His most frequently and wonderfully depicted characters are those civilian people who dash around to earn a living. Lao She has succeeded in describing the characteristics of the poor of their material and spiritual life, including their occupations, food, and sexual life in reality and their mental predicament. Nowadays, an era of reorientation of Poverty in both the material and spiritual realms has come, which brings a renewed historical climax of the problem of Poverty, a profound and overlooked fact of which is happen to be disclosed in Lao She's works.Chapter Five explores the civilian awareness reflected in Lao She's works. It accounts for the realism and pessimistic style in Lao She's civilian awareness on the basis of an argument about the outlet of the poor in his novel Camel Xiangzi. Lao She has conducted a literary and philosophical survey of the people's'misfortune in Poverty'with sympathy and love, demonstrating an equal care and sincere dialogue with the poor so that the tension between human beings and the Poverty hardship is explored. It is argued that the world of Poverty in Lao she's works is an abundant multiple worlds in which Lao She's comprehensive and profound understanding of the poor is manifest.The conclusion of the dissertation summarizes the problem of Poverty overlapped in the fields of literature and sociology. Poverty makes Lao She who promotes the study of Poverty in the literary and sociological domains from a brand new perspective. The current research on Lao She's childhood life and the world of Poverty in his works symbolizes a new cross-disciplinary perspective of literature and sociology in the study of Lao She and displays human beings'speculations on their own existence, the pursuit of life and aesthetic dimensions.