The Romantic Redemption—the Poetic Characteristics Of Shen Congwen’s Novels

This paper attempts to analyze poetic characteristics of Shen Congwen’s novels from the perspective of Ontology.Relating poetic existence Shen Congwen decribes to human alienation, this paper reveals the unique character and value of Shen Congwen’s novels. Sharp contrast remote Xiangxi to modern city, pre-modern to modern, outskirt to centre, Shen congwen questions the living way of modernists.Therefore, in his novel, there is a contrast of Xiangxi and modern city, in which he finds out poetic existence of human,and tries to change an alienated distorted life of modernists. Presently, we are getting further involved in modernity, the maladies in the modern are more serious. From the perspective of Ontology, researching the poetic feature of Shen Congwen’s novels is not only to explore the uniqueness of his literature, but to deeply reveal the mystery of Shen Congwen, meanwhile, also to explore our modern way of life, that is, our ultimate problem. This paper, regarding the poetic world in Shen Congwen’s novels as an independent, self-sufficient system, studies the characteristics of poetic existence from three dimensions-time, space and subject, revealing redemption for the real world with the poetic world. This paper mainly consists of the following four chapters:The first chapter discusses the poetic time, and from the time dimension analyzes poetic existence in Shen Congwen’s novels. Matei Calinescu thinks there is an irreconcilable opposition between two values in modernity, that is, social modernity also known as the opposition between enlightenment modernity and aesthetic modernity. The opposition between the two values corresponds to the two kinds of time concept: one is objective, measurable, and can be bought and sold as a commodity; The other is personal, subjective, suppositional, and is created by self development. Compared to the rational, constantly updated, homogenized time concept of social modernity, the intuitive, experiential, suppositional time concept of aesthetic modernity can well satisfy the needs of human life, which is considered as "original" time, also as poetic time. The poetic existence revealed in Shen Congwen’s literature, in the form of time, is a kind of poetic time. This paper analyzes the poetic time from the perspectives of cyclic, eternal and private time.The second chapter discusses the poetic space, and from the perspective of space analyzes poetic existence in Shen Congwen’s novels. This part mainly explores the poetic features of "Xiangxi" in Shen Congwen’s novel on the basis of the theory of humanistic geography. Xiangxi in Shen Congwen’s novel is poetic space, totally different from a modern, rational and cold urban city, where combining divinity, poetry and rich humanity as a whole, become a birthplace of modern spirit. First, Shen Congwen in his unique angle of view and with the background of minority culture discovers unique natural geographical landscape of Xiangxi, which is wild and original, but also is natural and friendly. Second, the poetic space construction of Xiangxi is related to cultural geographical landscape Shen Congwen describes.Regardless of his works labeled a mark of evil, Shen Congwen records the primitive religion, special social organization and customs, and the ghost culture in Xiangxi,finding out a divine world in the era of atheism. At the same time, Shen Congwen also discovers poetry from everyday life, and describes life experience as a kind of eternal landscape, making space become a "link", a familiar place, to make people feel a sense of belonging.The third chapter discusses the subject, and from the perspective of subject analyzes poetic existence in Shen Congwen’s novels. Poetic subject, a new concept of aesthetics, with aesthetics as a core structure, is a spiritual form with the features of autonomy, freedom and independence. Proposing poetic subject actually is the answer to the questions of how to survive and who people should be in modern and post-modern society. The poetic subject Shen Congwen creates is “country folk”. In the west, Nietzsche calls for a birth of “superman”to create a new-type human being. Shen Congwen, as a responder of Nietzsche’s philosophy, creates an image of “country folk”different from anyone else’s by the important result of his interpretation and discovery of human. The poetic subject “country folk”is in fact referred to “poet”Vico proposes who has a sound life instinct, natural way of living and aesthetic attitude towards life.The fourth chapter discusses the poetic redemption, and analyzes criticism and rebuilt of alienated modern civilization proposed by Shen Congwen as per the poetic existence. The main malady in modern society is faith decay and instinct failure. With deenchantment of modern society, human existence has nothing to do with divinity and has no uppermost value and significance. With the expansion of Instrumental Reason, human perceptual existence has been repeatedly constrained, and instinct, emotion, desire is regarded as unreasonable things, and alienation and self- alienation are becoming more and more serious. Shen Congwen,using new classic, thoroughly criticizes for modern civilization meanwhile, actively rebuilds. The rebuilt is no longer based on modern optimism, rationalism, and atheistic physics, but based on Dionysus spirit, poetic existence, metaphysics. Using poetic existence to overcome the maladies of modern civilization and rebuild the relationships between human and self, human and human, human and the world. The alienation between human and self, is caused by the opposition between mind and body, and the restriction of body and various instinct. To change the ideas of the Chinese people, Shen Congwen puts forward Somatic Ontology “god in life”. The alienation between human and human results from egoism caused by Instrumental Reason. The relations between human and human becomes money and trade relations. For the alienation, Shen Congwen advocates beauty and love to replace eclipse, indifference and intrigue, making the alienated world become the poetic world again. The alienation between human and the world, is caused by the relationship transition from affiliation to exploitation. Human existence loses its place to belong,divinity dimension as well. Therefore, Shen Congwen builds a poetic world where human and nature are living in harmony and unit as one.