| Lu Xun and Franz Kafka are of vital importance to China and Western countries respectively, representing the writing of their own times. Their writing styles are quite different, but there are still some similarities between them, which are their unique ideas and profound findings about the society of their times. Meanwhile, they strongly stood against the culture in their times and thus carried out cultural criticism.The author find, from works of their own, that the two writers carried out criticism from different angles of views. Lu Xun was doubtful about himself as an enlightener, while Kafka regarded himself as a seeker and inspirer. This paper conducts a tentative study to explore the deep reasons for differences of their ideas.Through analysis, conclusions can be made as follows:First of all, they are in different times. The difficulty Lun Xun faced at his times was natinal survival crisis, for which he had to criticize and rebuild culture of that time. However, the difficulty for Kafka was the decaying ideas of divine being and the overflowing modernity, which made him concern about himself more than his country.Second, they stand spiritually in different ways towards cultural criticism and hold different practice principles.Owing to the above reasons, they took different ways to save their countries. While Lu Xun chose enlightenment and finally chose to criticize about culture of that time, Kafka chose to bear it.The efforts Lu Xun made met some troubles, the reasons of which this paper explores. The lack of transcendentalism in China makes Lu Xun’s criticism sharp and bitter unlike the way Kafka behaves, and makes his enlightenment failed to save the country, though its goal is well-built. Yet, Kafka’s transcendentalism is a good way to save his country. It’s acceptable that Lu Xun uses his own way to save the country under that specific circumstances. On the other hand, it is worth reflecting on the way he adopts. |
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