The Variation Of Avant-Garde Consciousness In Chinese Contemporary Literature

Avant-garde literature is one of the most attractive topics in the history of Chinese contemporary literature. The avant-garde novels, as a representative school of Chinese avant-garde literature, raised and collapsed in the middle and late of 1980s. During the twenty years after its disintegration, it is still paid a lot of attention to all kinds of its aspects by the academia and received a mixed reception. During the middle and late of 1980s the scholars observed and discussed its novelty of creative skills closely;then in the 1990s they focused on the creative transformation of avant-garde writers;and after a period of profound reflection, they observed the position of avant-garde literature in the history of Chinese contemporary literature from grand perspectives and diverse approaches. As time going and the accumulation of critical practices as well as the change of critical theories, the trace of avant-garde consciousness in China emerged gradually. Based on the synthesis of study and critique on avant-garde literature in the whole New Era, the thesis discusses the variation of avant-garde consciousness in Chinese contemporary literature and explores its causes under the background of western avant-garde theories.The thesis focuses on literary concept of avant-garde consciousness. In this paper, it is not a literary school, nor is the thoughts in the history, but a kind of thinking mechanism existing in consciousness and a thinking dimension to rebel to traditional cultural ideas and realistic mainstream ideology.The paper contains three chapters. Chapter one traces the origin and development of the concept 'avant-garde consciousness' and surveys the characteristics of avant-garde thoughts. It compares the definition and theories of Chinese and western avant-garde consciousness and concludes the semantic differences and its main features. Chapter two looks back upon the process that the concept is introduced into China and analyzes its variation in Chinese contemporary literature through illustration. Chapter three tries to explore the causes of the variation in the literary paradigm under the socio-cultural context.This thesis, from the angle of variation in comparative poetics, observes the development of literary theory in the specific cultural context based on the theoretic background and the analysis of literary phenomenon. After combing and defining the concept of Avant-garde consciousness, the paper proceeds to discuss the inheritance and variation between Chinese and western avant-garde consciousness and concludes the inappropriateness of the name of the 'Avant-garde' Novel' in the history of Chinese contemporary literature.This thesis claims that, as a literary genre, 'Chinese Avant-garde Novel' has tremendous differences between its essence and denomination. Actually, 'Chinese Avant-garde Novel' is in essence an imitation of western Avant-garde literature, which has been discussed by academia already. There are several reasons for the inappropriate choice of the name for 'Chinese Avant-garde Novel'. The main reason at the objective aspect is that while modern works and theory of the west were introduced in a large amount in the 1980s, critical academicians and writers had the urgent psychology to catch up with or even surmount the western civilization, which led to misapprehension and to inappropriate name. The enormous transition of China's social environment of New Era has an inestimable impact on writer's creation, which is the objective cause. China has entered another new transformation period since the late of 1980s. At that time, the postmodern culture caused the lack of meaning and the consumer culture brought the absence of experience simultaneously, which transformed the pattern of our previous culture and caused the difficulty for Avant-garde consciousness to exit.In one word, avant-garde consciousness is the necessary characteristics for culture forerunners, which should be the critique power with prescience and dissociate with the mainstream cultural conception as well as the traditional cultural consciousness to aim at the cultural ideal with infinite possible.