"Secularization" Orientation Of Modern Chinese Literature

Secularization is an extremely important literary value orientation throughout the history of modern Chinese literature.In previous studies,secularization was often simply regarded as a kind of language style and literary form that is easy to understand.What’s more,some scholars believe that it leads to vulgar commodity markets and backward feudal concepts.Therefore,secularization was often denied in literary criticism and literary history writing.This simple value judgment shows that our theoretical discussion and scientific definition of secularization are far from enough.Reviewing the history of modern Chinese literature,we can find the variability and richness of secularization.It has always been intertwined with cultural enlightenment,revolutionary enlightenment and market consumption.It represented the victory of humanistic spirit,the choice of proletarian theory,the direction of workers,peasants and soldiers in literature and art,the revival and exploration of folk form,and the transcendence of literature over tradition under the effect of market.The secularization of literature has appeared in different forms in the modernization process of Chinese literature.It is worth thinking about the following questions.What kind of modernity did secularization reflect?How did it come into being,transform and develop?How did secularization participate in the formation of the nation state?What path of modernity did secularization point to?The introduction first answers the question of why we should study modern Chinese literature from the perspective of secularization.It investigates the modernity of Chinese literature,restores the deconstruction process of modernity,and constructs a new road of modernization based on the people.Then it defines the secularization of literature,distinguishes and analyzes several related concepts.Then it leads to five literary concepts that should be studied in detail:vernacular literature,proletarian literature,popularization of literature and art,folk features and popular literature and art.The first chapter discusses the humanistic spirit of vernacular literature.The vernacular literature is popular both in form and in thought.The first section shows the struggle between vernacular Chinese and classical Chinese.And it discusses how Hu Shih’s vernacular literary theory overthrew the classical Chinese orthodoxy.The second section explains the humanistic spirit of vernacular literature from three aspects:folk literature,western enlightenment thought and Russian humanitarianism thought.The third section discusses how vernacular literature moves towards Europeanization,which deviates from the road of popularizing literature.The second chapter discusses proletariat literature and class consciousness.After the emergence of the literary theory of the proletariat,the intellectuals who were far away from the people returned to the road of popularizing literature.The first section discusses the proletarian revolutionary literature theory of the Sun Society and the Late Creation Society.They launched a debate on revolutionary literature with the intellectuals represented by Lu Xun and finally established the same direction of proletariat literature.The second section discusses the theory construction and literary practice of proletariat literature in the 1930s.The third chapter discusses the role popularization of literature and art play in politics.The popularization of literature and art became a part of the political system during the Anti-Japanese War,which prompted intellectuals to carry out the practice of popularization of literature and art.The first section discusses the composition of the masses.The second section discusses how the petty bourgeois intellectuals completed the painful ideological transformation from individuals to members of the masses under the political discipline of authoritative discourse.The fourth chapter discusses the national characteristics of folk forms.The discussion of folk forms in wartime not only promoted the concrete practice of the popularization of literature and art,but also established the status of folk culture.Thus,we can consider the unique significance of localized literature.The first section discusses the combination of poetry and ballads,plays and yangko,novel writing and storytelling.The second section discusses the establishment of folk discourse system and the modern significance of local literature.The fifth chapter discusses the market-based popular literature and art.The market operation of literature is an unavoidable content in the study of modern Chinese literature.The market operation fundamentally affects the trend of literature.The first section discusses when ordinary citizens become real consumers of literature.The second section illustrates how to generate popular texts in the market with the example of tabloids and serialized novels.The third section discusses how popular literature and art promote the modernization transformation of citizen readers.The sixth chapter focuses on the analysis of the constant and variable in the process of secularization evolution.Constants have created the relatively stable secularization core of modern Chinese literature.That is the adherence to group rule and populism.Variables determine the specific forms of literary secularization,including the specific transformation of literary function,language construction and literary criticism criteria.The conclusion emphasizes several important viewpoints.And then considers the possibility of constructing a discourse system that is not completely dependent on the modernization of literature in the west.