A Comparative Study On Modernity In Chinese And German Literary Movements

Modernity is a crucial topic that can by no means be neglected in the process of literary development. Modernity has been dominating and transforming nature and discussing the possibility of human free development from multiple perspectives with an explicit purpose since its birth in the West. Beginning from the Great Discoveries of Geography, led by René Descartes’ rationalism and with Renaissance as the background, the West opened the door to the process of modernity with the property of “splitting” which differs from “pre-modernity”, so that social, historical and cultural modernized regularity appeared in a “spiraling” and “irreversible” trend in the world. Both Chinese and German literatures have experienced modernity based on their “traditions” respectively in their own contexts. This thesis aims the study at Chinese pioneering literature and Sturm und Drang in Germany, and lays emphasis on demonstrating the tension in enlightenment and aesthetics in modernity, the deep excavation of humans, diverse images of religious dimensions, young intellectuals’ varied modernity performances in their own works and the sources of the peculiarities of the choice differentiation affected by some common properties of modernity. This thesis is divided into three parts to illustrate the isomorphism and differentiation of Chinese and German literary movements.The first part demonstrates the definition and fundamental properties of modernity, makes an outline of the rediscovery of Chinese and German literary movements in the modernity horizon, and meanwhile, summarizes the profound historical background of modernity. Its main purpose is to describe the features needed in thesis during the summarization of the concept of modernity in order to lay the solid foundation of the illustration hereinafter.The second part mainly elaborates the grounding of the common enlightenment in Chinese and German literary movements and young writers’ rebellious spirit reflected in the aesthetics of works, which is a spiritual quality shared by homogeneity offered by modernity in their works. Affected by this spirit, young writers have finished literary works worthy of the era through their fresh creations in the fields that they focused on and specialized in.The last part is from the angle of the distinctions in the continued process of modernity. Between rationalism for enlightenment and the aesthetic tension, the literary movements in the two countries in different cultures and historical traditions have chosen different functions and purposes on aesthetic modernity. “Human” essential differences in the same inclination of the rediscovery and the attention to humans. Religious experience in the replacement and the comparison of perplexity.