An Analysis Of Shen Congwen's Cultural Conservatism Tendency

By analyzing Shen Congwen's evaluation on the traditional culture's value, this paper probes into his works from the cultural conservatism perspective, with an attempt to illustrate that his cultural conservatism tendency is a profile of"Cut Off Contact with Evil Persons and Stand Aloof From the World", a choice to reserve his independent opinion of the contemporary world and the unique modern.The first chapter introduces Shen went to the contrary against the background of an absolute negation of Chinese traditional culture and wholesale Westernization advocated by western radical enlightenment. He, making western Hunan and countrymen living there the carrier of traditional culture, tapped and affirmed the value of the Chinese traditional culture through extolling those people's virtues including diligence, intelligence, sincerity and purity. Confidence on and perseverance in Chinese traditional culture together characterize Shen's cultural conservatism trend, which is related with traditional cultural influence on him, and which is also linked with his reflection on radical enlightenment's dissociation of traditional culture and modern civilization. However, he didn't regard the Chinese traditional culture as a sole standard. Instead, he squared up to the absence in it and tried to seek a more reasonable way to modernization after revaluating traditional cultural values.Chapter two describes how the space shift gave shen an advanced idea of modern civilization. In the straight contrast between rural and urban areas, shen recognized modernization as an irreversible historical trend, meanwhile, he decided that problems occurred during propelling process shouldn't be overlooked either. Thus, he criticized and rethought, in terms of values collapse and depression and distortion of life, the modern civilization represented by urban life. Being confronted with the mutual contradiction of material evolution and spiritual degeneration, Shen ,as other cultural conservatives do, attempted to seek a solution with the support of Chinese traditional culture, especially the support of morality force. He made the traditional moral values more reasonable and inclusive by life scale integration, and hoped to resist spiritual degeneration in modern civilization by making the past values serve the present.Chapter three analyzes Shen's unique understanding of literature as well as politics and reaches to a conclusion that he had not escaped from politics his whole life, but took more responsibilities in his literature than other liberalists. He chose a comparatively conservative but the same solemn way to alter the national fortune, that is , by way of literature, not politic revolution. His devotion to literature is a different way to accelerate the modernization process, in the same function with anti-modernization trend of thought like romanticism.