On Zhou Zuoren’s Viewpoint Of The Common People’s Literature Around The Period Of The May 4th

The Common People’s Literature is one of the traditions which was started by New Literature of the May 4th. From then on, the trend of Chinese literature changed radically from being elegant to being common. And this trend continued for the whole 20 th century. During this period, the Chinese literature had gone through two significant transitions—— Democracy Literature in the Enlightenment era around the Period of the May 4th, and the ideological politicalization of the worker--peasant-soldier literature in the 1940 s. Zhou Zuoren was the first new literature theorist who put forward “The Common People’s Literature” in theory. In this text, the author studied Zhou Zuoren’s viewpoint of the Common People’s Literature in the living historical context as far as possible, revealed its unique ideological values by discriminating the logical relationship with the main tide. This paper consists of three parts:Chapter One starting from the key words“the Common People”, explored the turning of writing for the commons, and the trend of its development, as well as its internal logic. The author mainly stated the two significant transitions——Democracy Literature in the Enlightenment era around the Period of the May 4th, and the ideological politicalization of the worker-peasant-soldier literature in the 1940 s. From which we can see that, behind the revolution of writing for the commons, the cultural leadership was actually changed.In the second chapter, the author mainly discussed the basis and connotation of Zhou Zuoren’s viewpoint of the common people’s literature, and discriminated the logical relationship with the main tide of the didacticism. Zhou Zuoren’s “the Commons’ Literature” based on his theory of“Human Literature”, coring at the thought “individualism as well as humanism ” he put out,which required the works to be both common and sincere. His emphasis on elite expression and the opinion about “life of literature” were characteristic differing from the main trend.The third one mainly interpreted Zhou Zuoren responded no to the popular commons’ literature, based upon the fact that feelings must be the essence of literature. Thereby he came up with the standpoint that common people’s literature should be aristocratic somehow, which asked literature to be pure and transcendental. On this basis, he made it clear that the intellectual should make living on cultural production and creation, be an aristocrat in the spiritual sense, which maintained as modern intellectual we should keep consciousness and self-discipline correspond with each other in culture.