A Study Of "Folk" In 1990’s Literary Area Of China

The concept "folk", which is named by Chen Sihe in 1990’s, has been a buzzword in Chinese literary critics. As a kind of academic discourse, ambiguity and generalization appeared in the process of application. To explore the origin of "folk", we can’t ignore the macro-cultural context and academic manner of Chen Sihe, which are inevitable factors of this concept. Also, these factors are always neglected in former researches. This paper starts form here, review the macro-cultural context of 1990’s China and Chen Sihe’s aesthetic sensitivity, literature criticism method, personal thread of academic thought and the thinking of literary history. Then, in the practice of literature criticism, we see both good and bad points of the concept "folk". On the one hand, "folk" opened the aesthetic space of writings during anti-Japanese war and the Cultural Revolution. One the other hand, the limitation of this concept are also exposed in this process. At last, this paper will return to the study on concept:the real folk and the idealization "folk". In the process of revealing contradiction between these two parts, this paper will show the enlightenment of concept "folk" in methodology of humanities study.