On The Modernistic Tendency Of The Chinese Short Essays In The Late Korean Dynasty

This dissertation takes the Chinese short stories of the late Korean Dynasty as the object of research and explores the modern elements represented in these stories by synthesizing the literary cultural approach, the poststructuralist approach and the new historical approach. In essence, literature is a kind of ideology and this kind of ideology is determined by the social structure, i.e. superstructure is determined by economic foundation. Superstructure and economic foundation are complementary and ideology is a representation of superstructure.This dissertation attempts to focus on the modernistic tendency and moder nicity refers to capitalization, which includes industrialization and commercializa tion in economy, legalization and democratization in politics, and individuation and equalization in social identity. Compared with the traditional feudal society, the process of modernization is a transition from feudal society to capitalist s ociety and this process will bring changes to social productivity, economic syst em, political system, and even the diversification of ideas and culture, ways of life, values and mentality. Of all these changes, the most important thing is t he industrialization of economy and democratization of politics. This dissertatio n will look at the modernicity that appeared in the long transitional from the f eudal society to the capitalist society, which is closely related to but different from the modern factors.Marxist political economics holds that the economic foundation determines superstructure. Literature, in essence, is an ideology of superstructure, therefore it is determined by social and economic foundation. Therefore it is necessary to get a deep understanding of the changes in the social and economic structure of the late Korean Dynasty and the subsequent changes in the institutions, customs and social values in this historical period before we start to look at the modernistic tendency in the short stories as a kind of ideology.The two wars, which happened between 1592 and 1637, functioned as a dividing line in the Korean history. With the peaceful restoration for nearly one hundred years after the wars, especially in the second half of the 18th century, handicraft enjoyed further development in both urban and rural areas. This enhanced the sense of commerce, promoted the development of commerce and increased commercial capital. And these economic changes helped to enhance capitalist relation of production, but caused a crisis for the feudal system of Korea. For example, the shaking and toppling of the feudal identity system, the chaos and corruption in power politics and among government officials, and the aggression of the Catholic and boats from Europe and the United States pushed the feudal system into a very difficult position.The language data of this dissertation are the Chinese short stories taken from(东稗洛诵》(at the end of the 18th century) and《溪西野谈》(1883)by Li Xizhun,《东野汇辑》(1869) by Li Yuanming,《霅桥漫录》(during the Yingzu Period),《霅桥别集》(during the Yingzu Period),《青丘野谈》(1864) and《记闻丛话》(at the beginning of Chunzu Period) by An Xijing. To be more specific, the language data of this dissertation are all taken from A Collection of Chinese Short Stories of Li Dynasty (three volumes) edited by the two Korean scholars Li Youcheng and Lin Yingze in 1980s. They made their selection from the above-mentioned 39 sources.Chapter Two discusses the appearance of capitalist production relationship, the new tendency in the identity hierarchy system, the expansion of material desire and the emergence of new life style, the prevailing of sound scholarship and changes of social values, and the budding of modernistic tendency. All these economic, institutional, behavioral and conceptual changes in the late Korean Dynasty served as the social context or social presupposition and social condition for the deictic factors of modernistic tendency represented in the Chinese short stories of this period as a kind of ideology.Chapter Three analyzes the sense of commerce, sense of identity, sense of ethics and sense of sex in the above-mentioned short stories. Modernicity here means capitalism, and modernistic tendency factors refer to the factors that tend for capitalism. The above-mentioned five senses were entirely new things, which indicated a very clear tendency towards capitalism.Chapter Four discusses hotel guests, brokers, business swindlers, ordinary but rich guys, rich servants, and powerful business women, none of which appeared in earlier literature. This chapter focuses on the strong desire of the new rising classes for wealth, for higher social status and for freedom from the confinement of the feudal ethics and sex discrimination. The appearance of the new rising classes and their strong desires served as the modernistic tendency factors.Chapter Five discusses the modernistic tendency represented in genre, style and plot.Chapter Six is the concluding part of this dissertation. It summarizes the status and significance of the Chinese short stories of the late Korean Dynasty in the history of Korean classical novels, and points out that the realistic writing style with realistic critical spirit and the strong sense of nationality laid a very solid foundation for the later national enlightening Korean literature.The Chinese short stories of the late Korean Dynasty in the 18th-19th centuries appeared with the historical phenomena as their social background. Their genre was based on biographies and folklores and directly and indirectly influenced by the vernacular novels, notes and essays of the Ming and Qing Dynasties.Most of these Chinese short stories were based on the stories told by ordinary people and contained more or less subjective feelings and ideas of the transcribers and editors. The writers of these stories could be professional story tellers like the Legendary Old Man and they put down these oral stories on to. paper. Some of them were famous while others were not so famous. They, by using simple Korean-styled Chinese, succeeded in truthfully reflecting the formation of cities and changes in the countryside in the process of commercial and monetary development, the declining of the noble and the quiet emergence of the new rising rich class.In addition, they revealed the shaking of the feudal identity system caused by the new rising rich class coming up to the social and economic stage, and the contradiction between the instinctive desires of ordinary people and the ethic and moral norms of the society.Although they were strongly influenced in the early formative stage by the Chinese classical literature, the Chinese short stories of the late Korean Dynasty in the 18th and 19th centuries managed to get rid of the Chinese influence as time passed by and found their own path of development and established their own national characteristics in both content and form by the end of the late Korean Dynasty.Another important thing is that although the Chinese short stories of the Korean Dynasty had a realistic tendency representing the history and real life in Korea since their first appearance, this tendency became even stronger in the 18th and 19th centuries.To conclude, the Chinese short stories of the 18th and 19th in Korea has an irreplacible significance and value and their realistic critical spirit and remarkable realistic writing style laid a solid foundation for the later national enlightening literature in Korea.