The Return To Historical Truth

As an important participator in Chinese revolution during the Yan'an period and its historical narration, Yan'an literature is of double significance to both revolutionary and literary history. As the literature contains the liveliest and richest historical memories of the Yan'an period, a study of it not only concerns itself, but concerns the construction and reevaluation of the history of Chinese modern and contemporary literature and culture at large. The dissertation holds Yan'an literature to be a unique and rare phenomenon of communication via the concerted movements of the press and the theatrical performances of the general public. Literary creation at this period conformed precisely to news dissemination in its communicative end—the most straightforward goal, the most direct reading public and the most remarkable results in that special wartime atmosphere. The synchronic and diachronic diffusing effect of Yan'an literature during modern Chinese historical process, along with the diffusing practice that involved the ordinary masses of the whole nation, has rendered Yan'an literature sociologically valuable for a multi-dimensional study and evaluation. Hence, the dissertation intends to explore the historical truth, aiming for a return to the historical context through the study of the spreading of Yan'an literature. It seeks to restore the vivid course of history and to explore the literature's production mechanism, meaning construction and dissemination pattern, so as to give Yan'an literature an all-round, in-depth and dynamic scrutiny.Literary dissemination exists in the media and ecological environment constituted of all the factors of society. In analyzing the ecology of politics, culture and media, the dissertation holds that Yan'an, as the wartime political and cultural center, had a fixed image of ideal state or Utopia in the minds of the intellectuals, and that the convergence and restructuring of May 4^th literature, Chinese Soviet Area literature and left-wing literature had provided Yan'an literature with abundant spiritual resources and the new literary tradition. Emerging together with this artistic depth in the ecology of revolutionary wars was the intellectuals' strong sense of anxiety due to the intensifying social and political crises. As the sense of mission for the nation, the class and the party joined the sense of mission for literature at a particular historical point, literature inevitably mingled with revolution and politics, making the dissemination of Yan'an literature a weapon to propagandize the War of Resistance Against Japan. The ecology for dissemination, made of the special political context of revolutionary wars in the Yan'an period, had determined to a large extent the existence and creation of Yan'an literature, as well as the essential factors and pattern of its diffusion: cultural imbalance and multi-levelled reading public with diverse receiving capacities, multiple identities and role transformations of disseminators, collective creative mode involving the blending and interaction between disseminators and receivers.The media, which record the original process of a historical event's emergence and evolution while it is actually happening, are the primary carrier of literary and cultural transformations. The media act as "live fossil", enabling us to return to the historical scene so as to investigate the evolution, the spreading and the reception of literature. Based upon the study of the media-literature relationship, the dissertation combs through the source materials of periodicals and newspapers during the Yan'an period, and analyzes these two means of communication in terms of communication system, scholarly communities and newspapers and periodicals, process and effect of the press's communication. In the coordinated movements of the media's and literature's dissemination, the media's homogeneous function to represent and to show merged with the function of literature to construct Yan'an literature's wide space of imagination in portraying the nation and the people. The press placed literature into a new communication context, while simultaneously regulating the internal order of literature. The exploration of this effective means of literary dissemination had rendered Yan'an literature diametrically different from the literature in Kuomintang-controlled area and enemy-occupied area.The mingling and expansion of medium forms constituted a distinctive feature not to be ignored in the history of Yan'an literature's dissemination. The concept of medium was no longer restricted to newspapers, periodicals, magazines and other forms of communication; rather, all medium forms available to humanity ever since the birth of human communication had been utilized to diffuse Yan'an literature in the extreme wartime conditions. The poems for recitation, street poetry and yangge operas which thus took shape constituted an important chapter in modern literary history. The dissertation perceives the mingling and expansion of medium forms in spreading Yan'an literature as a significant practice that reconstructed the literary dissemination of the ordinary masses. Poetry recitation and street poetry movement had brought about the return and sublimity of poetry in the process of its diffusion. Yangge opera movement turned theatre from the crude dancing and singing into the carrier of real life, and festive performances of ordinary people in the squares made possible the restructuring of the diffusing mode from theatres to squares.Yan'an period embodies all the theories and practices of Chinese Communist Party to rely on Yan'an as the strategic and cultural center to fight the War of Resistance and to build the nation; therefore, the period has multiple historical connotations politically, economically and culturally. The dissemination of Yan'an literature, on account of its very nature, was standardized and incorporated into the system of revolutionary propaganda through agenda-setting and other means. The function of literature to diffuse social ideology was given fullest play and literature thus became an efficient instrument for propaganda. Undoubtedly, the unprecedented success of the spreading of Yan'an literature has made it a specimen for study in literature dissemination. The research value of this sample-analysis also lies in the fact that the close scrutiny of the phenomena of literature dissemination in a particular ecology will be beneficial not only to our transcending the specific area and period to gain inspirational reflections of a time, but also to our observing from the opposite angle some mistaken ideas in the craze for studying literature dissemination so as to derive enlightenment in methodology.