A Look At T.A. Hsia's Studies On Chinese Modern Literature

Mainly based on these works:The Gate of Darkness: Studies on the Leftist Literary Movement(English edition,1968;Chinese edition,2015),Selected Works of T.A.Hsia(Taiwan version,1971;Mainland version,2002),and the magazine Literary Review(1956-1960),along with combined with letters of C.T.Hsia and T.A.Hsia(Book One-Book Three),and T.A.Hsia's other theses,this paper attempts to analyze and interpret T.A.Hsia's leftist literary ideas,whose researches on leftist writers,whose studies of leftist works as well.Meanwhile,this paper tries to teased out and clarify T.A.Hsia's May Fourth literature history view and his major research methods implied in these works.My first concern is T.A.Hsia's westernization and conservatism under the influences of western culture ? local culture and historical background implied in his works;meanwhile,though,as a exilic intellectual,his marginality and Edward Said's amateurism existed in his mind,which prompted him to exile again and again over 30 years.T.A.Hsia faced the same historical circumstance with his May Fourth seniors,his researches showed sufficient responsibility on national culture,along with acceptance on Leftist Literary except criticizing.In terms of his research methods,T.A.Hsia have the same understanding with his May Fourth seniors about world literature.Hsia showed characteristic comparative literature vision.In his writing,the modern Chinese literature were part of the world literature existed during the same period.Secondly,this paper attempts to tease out some clear clues about T.A.Hsia's contribution on study of modern Chinese literature by his writing and edit.I try to reveal Hsia's rediscoveries about the literature never treated seriously at any time before in his May Fourth seniors' or his mainland peers' modern Chinese literature history writings.Meanwhile,I attempt to analyze the psychological color and the open characters existed throughout Hsia's historical construction on modern Chinese literature.The psychological color embodied on the metaphorical term:“inferiority complex”,invented by Alfred Adler,to explain the psychological entanglement existed in Chinese intellectuals after the May Fourth movement.Hsia applied it to his researches on left-wing writers,so studies on spiritual history became the core of this book The Gate of Darkness(1968).Moreover,the open characters of his research embodied on two ways:the dialogicality on modern Chinese literature history studies between his and the mainland peers';as a editor and critic he was active in Taiwan's literary world when he edited Literary Review in the Fifties.Since then T.A.Hsia treated modern Chinese literature from the time of May Fourth movement as a imperfect and open literary tradition.Thirdly,this paper emphatically analyzes T.A.Hsia's works written in English(especially,The Gate of Darkness)after he went to America for the second time.I put an emphasis on his researches about the Chinese Leftist Literary Movement.This paper tries to get rid of the meaningless controversy about political stand,put the research emphasis on T.A.Hsia's narrative mode of the Chinese Leftist Literary Movement and his studies on spiritual history of Chinese left-wing writers.As a supplementary content,I discuss the biases and misunderstands existed in T.A.Hsia's studies on the leftist literary movement caused by American Area studies in the Fifties.By using two research samples,T.A.Hsia's studies on Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai and Lu Hsün,I analyze Hsia's academic views and narrative modes of literature history under the cover of psychological color.Hsia's viewpoint,Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai was a tenderhearted communist in fact.The terminology “tenderhearted” was derived from the psychologist William James' partitioning method on personality temperament.By means of William James' partitioning method,T.A.Hsia put Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai in such a privative field:tenderhearted and hardhearted.By close reading on biographical material of Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai and Ch'ü's early books,combining with interpretation about Superfluous words,T.A.Hsia tried to describe this image of a dysphoric and contradictory left-wing writer.Certainly,T.A.Hsia's discoveries on Ch'üCh'iu-pai had its value,but more or less,his research neglected Ch'ü's another identity,revolutionist.About the position of Lu Hsün in literature history,T.A.Hsia didn't regard him as a representative of the May Fourth Movement:“Lu Hsün was not a true representative of the May Fourth Movement insofar as that term is understood to mean a popular movement with positive aims to discard the old and adopt the new.”Hsia tended to think Lu Hsün's tendency of creation more belong to modernism rather than realism.It is noteworthy that,about relationship between Lu Hsün and the Chinese leftist Literary Movement,indeed,Hsia's degree of emphasis on Lu Hsün's essays was continuously strengthened.In Hsia's earlier writings(Lu Hsün and the League of Leftist Writers,1959),Hsia agreed with William Schultz's viewpoint that in 1926 “the year…marks the end of Lu Hsün's creative life”.But in Aspects of Power of Darkness in Lu Hsün(1964),in fact,his opinions were amended.Different from general perspective on Lu Hsün studies,T.A.Hsia's research emphasis on Lu Hsün's essays was aesthetic taste more than ideological value.Meanwhile,Hsia paid special attention to the historic symptoms along with psychological color implied in Lu Hsün's essays.