"Exploring The Source And Digging The Current" In The Post-modern Vision

David Der-wei Wang is one of the famous scholars of contemporary Chinese literature in north American sinology.His research covers literary criticism,Chinese literature,literary history and other aspects.However,the modernity of Chinese literature is a key issue that he is concerned about,and it has aroused much attention and repercussions in mainland academic circles.David Der-wei Wang research on the modernity of Chinese literature can be summarized as"exploring the source and digging the current",which runs through the post-modern vision of reflecting on modernity.On the one hand,he devoted himself to exploring the modernity of the late Qing dynasty which was suppressed by the mainstream narrative discourse of the May Fourth and pushed the source of the modernity of Chinese literature to the late Qing dynasty.Taking the four major types of novels,such as Xiaxie novels in the late Qing dynasty,as his research object,he used Michel Foucault's method of knowledge archaeology to explore the modern expression of "seeking for novelty and change" in the literature of the late Qing dynasty from two aspects of content and form.Taking the realism of May Fourth movement as the reference point,he studied the free space of innovation that the technique of "parody" gave to the form of writers in the late Qing dynasty.In terms of content,David Der-wei Wang turned to the dialectical thinking of four modern discourses of"desire,justice,value and knowledge" in four major novels,so as to compare with the phenomenon that the four modern discourses in the modern literary tradition are unified in the "feeling of worrying about the country".In the whole process of deconstruction,construction and consolidation,David Der-wei Wang's research has some limitations,such as ignoring the necessary conditions for the emergence of modernity and lacking the necessary explanation of "modernity".Although there are certain limitations,David Der-wei Wang's exploration of modernity in the late Qing dynasty still affected some aspects of the mainland academic research,such as the impact on the order of traditional literary history,the mainland academic review of late Qing literature,popular literature received more attention.On the other hand,he invented a new interface to explore modernity--"lyricism",trying to jump out of the traditional vision of enlightenment and revolution and discover more aspects of Chinese literary modernity.David Der-wei Wang would propose to explore modernity with "lyricism" for three main reasons:self-reflection of academic research,thinking on modernity and monster,and inspired by western scholars' reflection on modernity with "lyricism".In order to establish the rationality of lyrical intervention in modernity,David Der-wei Wang extended the definition of "lyric" to emphasize the multidimensionality of lyric in modern context;He dialectical lyric and epic relationship,in order to determine the existence of lyric in the epic era.In addition,he identified the interaction between the lyrical self and the change of the world as an important way to construct the modern Chinese subject.In David Der-wei Wang's analysis of specific cases,we find that "lyrical modernity" actually points to the resistance and alienation of modernity,which reflects his own value standpoint of postmodernism.