Active Fighting Spirit: The Practicality Of Hu Feng's Literary And Artistic Thoughts

Hu Feng is a literary and artistic theorist and critic with very independent consciousness in modern Chinese literature. The essence of Hu's literary and artistic thought is the "active fighting spirit," which emphasizes that the subject should fully develop his mental function and the capacity of "chemical reaction" with mutual promotion and constraint through experiencing, penetrating and selecting the sources of his creation. As a continuation and development of Lu Xun's spirit and a reference to Kuriyagawa Hakuson's and Gorky's views on literature and art, Hu's realist theory is a profound reflection on the left-wing literary and artistic practices. Its establishment also results from the debate with mainstream left-wings represented by Zhou Yang, the criticism of non-mainstream writers like Lin Yutang, and the specific instruction for the July literary and artistic criticism and action. The fighting spirit in literary and artistic criticism and action enables Hu's thought to exhibit the unifications between subject and object, sociology and aesthetics, and subjectivity and enlightenment. Rather than a detailed analysis of logical deduction, his theoretical construction is unique, full of fighting power and poetics. Through the examination of the literary and artistic practices since the establishment of PRC, Hu finds out the problems of partisanship characteristic in literary and artistic views centered on The Speech and criticizes the literary organization of writers'association which makes literature deviate from the subject and leads to political fetishization. His contradiction with The Speech eventually leads to his life tragedy.