Study Of Shen Cong-wen's Literary Creation

As the king of modern Chinese short stories, Shen Congwen has made remarkable historical contributions to various aspects of modern literature. This thesis aims to study Shen Congwen's cross-style writing, creation of characters, narrative art, and idealized construction of Xiangxi (West of Hunan) Utopia.Shen Congwen utterly breaks the trichotomy of "structure, character, and environment" of novel that takes up the dominant position since the May Fourth Movement, and considers that the novel is appropriately noting down the persons and things with words, including "social phenomenon" and "phenomenon of dreams". To produce a novel, the two compositions, namely, "reality" and "dream", must be mixed up, and decorated and tailored extremely well with language. Shen Congwen holds that the novel should "be injected a kind of poetic emotion", "be similar to prose" and "integrate prose into fiction stories", which gets rid of the restraint of stylistic classification and creates an integrated style. The thesis not only makes an accurate analysis of the macro theories for Shen Congwen's cross-style writing, but also offers an in-depth study on the "poeticizing", "prosifying", and "dramatizing" and other integrated style of Shen's novels. There are some creative points of the thesis. It pays attention on the poeticizing of the novels with urban themes, which has not received enough concern from scholars. For the novels with Xiangxi themes, the thesis not only mentions the poeticizing, but also analyzes the evolutionary process of poeticizing. The prosifying of Shen's novels is discussed from two stages: the early stage and the mature stage, and the author particularly shows a number of different perspectives on the prosifying of Shen's novels at the early stage. For the dramatizing of Chen's novels, the author finds that there are three types, namely, the "Shakespeare" dramatic novel, novel with characteristics of "three unities" drama, and the novel combining the features of drama and novel. For the integrated style novels, the paper discusses the integration of various styles and the integration of prose and novel, and meanwhile makes proper assessment on the significance of the style integration. Shen Congwen organically integrates various styles, gives full play to the advantages of poetry, prose, drama, and fiction, and thus diversifies the literary forms and expands genre scope of traditional novels, and creates new literary forms to serve the modern ideological contents.In the creation of characters, Shen Congwen adheres to the principle of "approaching humanity and human sentiment" and writes in accordance with the reality. He is not restricted by "the fashion of an era", and creates a lot of immortal artistic figures with deep humanity for modern literature. The paper discusses seven kinds of "more humane" ways of writing, and stresses that only by understanding Shen's truthful and "more humane" writing ways can one better understand Shen's works. In addition, the paper provides some new interpretation of some works that have been misunderstood. Shen Congwen makes extremely detailed and delicate description of the deep subconsciousness of characters to represent their "emotional inflammation". By adopting Freud's psychoanalytic method in explaining Shen's description of characters, the thesis offers new interpretations and deepens the understanding of Shen's description of subconscious psychology which intensifies the authenticity and depth of characters and greatly pushes forward the transformation of modernization of character creation in Chinese novels. The characters created by Shen Congwen are innocent and naive, and integrated into the environment. The behavior of characters retains a high degree of the original ecological nature. Shen Congwen is versed in art dialectics, and "writes from the other side" by breaking the conventions of art. He highlights the important role of stereotype by explaining the dialectic relationship between stereotype and typification, highlights the description of trifles and just lightly touches on major critical incidents, and holds that "the writing of human's joy is for embodying their sufferings". It is precisely because Shen masters the art dialectics in representing characters that he makes remarkable artistic achievements in characters creation. The paper tries to conduct a solid and in-depth analysis of the means and methods in Shen's creation of characters.The scholars majoring in studying Shen Congwen's narrative art hold that his narrative art marks the peak of modern Chinese novels, but it has also undergone a process from the immature stage to the mature and even perfection stage. The paper does not follow the traditional way of dividing Shen's novels into urban and rural themes, but rather from the perspective of narrative, classify his novels into "â… " type and "Noâ… " type. The "â… "type novels, due to the influence of Shen's own life and his pursuit of the novel's authenticity and attraction, may be trivial, sluggish and lengthy in narration. Yet in the "No I" type novels, the author (Shen Congwen) can be separated from himself and pursue the artistic effect of novels as a "calm spectator", and thus get rid of the redundant and diffuse narrative and yield bright, terse and powerful effects. The paper also analyzes the artistic achievements Shen Congwen made in his novels. At the mature stage, the narrator "I" gradually retires, and Shen adopts character narrative and omniscient narrative which consists of three types: "omniscient editor type", "neutral omniscient type", and "drama-style type". At that time, Shen takes omniscient narrative and character narrative alternately and thus produces an intertwined narrative perspective to promote the development of story plots. The paper also analyzes Shen's attitudes towards innocent narrative and objective narrative, and views that the innocent narrative has the effect of being cordial, real, polyphonic and irony, while the objective narrative adheres to the moderation principle of art and makes contribution to the healthy development of Chinese narrative art in 1930s. The part of studying narrative structure discusses the casual and loose features of Shen's novels at the early stage, analyzes the twelve ways to make a start of a novel, and makes in-depth research on the two novel structures at the mature stage:the loose structure with sudden turn of plots, and straightforward narration with inherent tension. The paper also offers innovative exposition of the laissez-faire and delicate arrangements of narrative time, the narrative speed and the "regularity" and "change" of life, as well as the single narrative and repeated narrative.The Xiangxi Utopia is an artistic milestone Shen Congwen contributes to the contemporary Chinese art, and is also a sparkling artistic pearl for the whole mankind. The paper discusses Shen's creation of "Greece Temple" which "worships humanity", and puts forward that the essence of pastoral tone of art is in line with the classical Greek idealistic thoughts and creation in the contemporary and modern times. Shen tries to, with the healthy life patterns and the art style full of pastoral tone in ancient Greece as example, build the Xiangxi Utopia, which sets up a personality paradigm for modern China and provides an art resource for the development of modern Chinese art. Shen Congwen builds the Xiangxi Utopia from two aspects:first, he pushes the time back to the remote "glorious age" of the Miao ethnic minority; second, he chooses the border area of Xiangxi to lay the idealized and touching life pattern. "The Border Town", which shows a paradise for human being, is the work into which Shen Congwen pours the utmost enthusiasm and perseverance, and is the most outstanding representative of pastoral imagination works on the theme of Xiangxi Utopia. It is not only a social tragedy, but also a Grecian tragedy of fate. The paper makes detailed analysis of Shen's acquisition of the pastoral tone from natural environment, social life, cultural foundation, life forms and pioneer expressions. Finally, it considers Shen Congwen as China's greatest novelist of the pastoral novels, as he really does a perfect job in this field.