The Floating Soul And Personality Contradiction

This dissertation takes the modern writer's identity confusion as the starting point to go on the investigation and research, and aims to reveal the intrinsic personality contradiction of the modern writers through the summarization and description of the characteristics of their identity confusion. Furthermore, it also discusses the relationship between the writer's identity confusion and the paradoxical problems of "the traditional and the modern", "the outstanding and the popular", "the instrumental and the independent" in modern literature, which is the research focus of this disertation.The disertation is divided into five parts:The introduction part of this paper mainly studies two aspects: First, it defines the meaning of the "identity" as an analysizing tool; then, it analyzes the development of "the literature tool theory" in modern literature and explains its influences on modern writer's identity confusion and personality contradiction.Chapter 1 mainly discusses how the identity confusion of modern writers, between "the peasant" and "the urbanite", influences the "enlightening nature" of modern literature. It is divided into three parts. Firstly, it defines nine important concepts: "the village", "the town" , "the city", "the peasant", "the small town people", "the urbanite" , "the tradition", "the modern age", and "the modernity". Then, in order to prove the connection between those paradoxical literature phenomena and the modern writer's cultural identity confusion between "the peasant" and "the urbanite", the author discusses the three paradoxs between Lu Xun's "dropping surgical scapel for writing pen" and his "pursuing modern civilization", "criticizing to the local" and "returning of the spirit", "the broken dream of returning to the native place" and "the criticism of the city". She also combines the text analysis of Lu Xun's"May 4th Local Fiction", Shen Congwen and Xiao Qian's "Pastoral Novel" and "City Novel" of the Beijing School", Jiang Guang Ci. and Ding Ling's "Left-wing Local Novels" and "Left-wing City Novels", and Mu Shiying, Shi Zhecun's "New-sensation Novels" in the discussion. The analysis shows that it was the cultural identity confusion of the modern writers that resulted in the emptiness feature of the initial enlightening purpose of the modern literature, and the swinging of the literature spirit between the modern and the traditional.Chapter 2 mainly discusses the connection between the modern writers' role-shifting from the initiator to "being initiated", and the transformation of modern literature from "the outstanding" to "the popular". It was divided into three parts. Two levels are discussed in the first part. In the first level, it sets the writings of "The May Fourth writers" and the "Left-wing writers" as the research objects, and compares the differences between the Western Enlightenment Spirit and "The May Fourth Enlightenment" spirit, through analyzing the enlightenment writings of Lu Xun and Ding Ling, to hint the real reason of the doomed failure of "The May Fourth" enlightenment movement. The author holds that it was the "May Fourth" writers' misreading of the westen Enlightenment writings and their failure to seize the reins of government that led to the failure of the enlightenment. The research object of the second level is the "Revolution and Love" novels after the failure of "the Great Revolution" of Ding Ling, Ba Jin and Mao Dun. Through summarizing and analyzing their narrative styles, the author aims to reveal the contradiction between the "revolutionary discourse" and the "freedom discourse" in their writings, and to show the intrinsic personality conflict of those writers in their role-shifting process from "the New Youth" to "the revolutionary". The author believes that the modern writers' understanding of the "asceticism" and "moralism" actually means the criticism of the "the revolutionary discourse" to "the May Fourth discourse", and the doubt and denial of "the May Fourth" intellectuals to their own identy as enlightenors. The second part sets the Left-Wing literature and "the Red Classics" after the founding of the People's Republic as the research obects, aiming to reveal the modern revolutionary writers' dilemma of their identity belongings between the intellectuals and the broad masses of workers and peasants, together with the barriers between them. The author holds that "turning intellectuals into workers" and "turning peasants into political leaders" are two important identity-switching modes of modern literature in the context of "ideological remolding of the intellectuals". When the spirit and physical sacrifice of the intellectuals , just like the Rise of the Phoenix, were imagined as the only way in the movement of "turning intellectuals into workers", the invisible manipulation of the collectivism ideology to the intellectuals and the intellectuals' eager for quick success in the revolution were revealed. The third part mainly analyzes that, it was the barrier between the modern writers' intellectual identity and the workers / peasants that resulted in the conflict between the "outstanding discourse" and "the popular" requirement in the development of the modern literature. Through the analysis of the paradox between the "outstanding" nature of the vernacular writings in the May Fourth movement and "the literature for the common people", and the slogan of "Popular Literature" in 1930s and 1940s, the author believes that the definition of "popularization" has ont only an dislocation in the concept, but also many practical difficulties in the literature appreciation and creation of the mass. It reflects the worship of the intellectuals to the workers and peasants in a special historical context. While the deeds of "literature popularization" of the Left-wing could be treated as a means to turn the intellectuals into workers or peasants, which was an strategy of the mainstream art or the official art trying to realize the ideology transformation through art transformation.Chapter 3 mainly discusses the conflict between "the instrumental" and "the independent" nature of modern literature, which was caused by the modern wriers' identity confusion between "the fighter of the age" and "the romantic poet". It was divided into two parts. The first part aims to reveal the connection between the modern writers' paradoxical identity between "the writer" and "the fighter", and the weakening of the independent nature of modern literature , through the description of the soul journey of those "Yan'an intellectuals", such as Ding Ling, He Qifang, and Ai Qing in their transformation from "the writer " to "the fighter", and through the analysis of the pesonality contradiction of a group of people, such as: Guo Moruo, Mao Dun, Cao Yu, Ding Ling and so on in their transformation from "out the system" to"in the system". The seond part mainly aims to reveal the tragic conflicts between the "individuality words" and the "unification words" in the development of modern literature, through the research of Ding Ling's ten-year writings in Yan'an, and the struggle of Wang Shiwei, Hu Feng, and Shu Wu to "break through the mainstream ideology".Through the further analyzing of the expelling of collectivism to individual consciousness, the conclusion of this paper tries to discuss the main reasons of the failure of the enlightenment. The author holds that, it was the one-sided emphasis on changing the intellectuals' bourgeoisie consciousness, together with the neglect to the changing of the small-scale production consciousness (feudal consciousness) of the intellectuals, the workers and peasants, as well as the instrumental status of modern literature, that resulted in the failure of the literature modernization.