Publicity And Breakthrough Of The Discourse

This paper has studied Lu Xun's later essays by putting it into the public sphere of the 1930s Shanghai. Due to his coming Shanghai from Beijing, Lu Xun's life style and the forms of creation had a great change. The transference of space helped the constitution of the later essays' writing background of Lu Xun in three aspects. Firstly, in the subjective aspect, Lu Xun's change from a professor to a free columnist, on one hand, brought him into the noisy social life a lot more frequently from his peaceful and lonely academic life, and the change on the other hand dispelled his former lofty sense of an enlightening hero since his literature creation had become a method for a living. Secondly, as the main mechanism of public sphere, the newspaper industry which was more and more prosperous and popular had caused a closer relationship between Lu Xun's later essays and the public, and thus those essays had their publicity. Finally, the metropolitan culture of colonial Shanghai broadened their criticism scope in areas of society and civilization.This background had also determined the public characteristics of Lu Xun's essays in his later writing stage. First, dialogic nature, that is to say that Lu Xun by his essays made responses to the current events and the social phenomena, and formed an interaction and conversation network between him and the whole society by media of newspapers. Second, critique. Lu Xun's later essays covered more critical fields. That's a sort of criticism in which he take himself as the weak one to rebel all oppression forms, slavery, despotism. Although he had joined associations such as "the Left-wing League" etc. he still maintained independence of critique and had made certain contributions to the development and consolidation of public sphere. Finally, the essay style also had some change, from longitudinal, historical reflection of time dimension in the earlier period transferred towards the later crosswise dynamic attention to the reality of spatial dimension, moved towards the microscopic concrete analysis from the macroscopic rational thinking. The most obvious characteristic in the technique of expression is that news texts were massively used as well as Shanghai dialect entered gradually. But in aspect of function, it was a kind of "breakthrough of discourse" by Lu Xun , who served as a public intellectual facing those various intellectuals discourses including therevolutionary, the liberalism, the commercial and the governmental. During this process, he had persisted in his "Cultivating talent" thought, adhered to the thought of paying close attention to the spiritual phenomena hiding in public affairs. His essays' writing itself is sort of discourse practice. ' ?With this, I believed that, publicity is essential attribute of Lu Xun's later essays, and breakthrough of discourses is the functional form. Actually, Lu Xun anticipated in creating one ideal genre of public sphere in which every one can discuss public issues freely, democratically. In this realm, the down-trodden populace can also voice, moreover the intellectual truly represent the populace and give a good beating at the phenomena of slavery, oppression, despotism. Only by this can China transfer gradually from a country as a pile of sands to be a country with awaken individuals.