Avant-garde literature-school introduction
The basic stereotype of the concept of "avant-garde literature" in I am a young wine jar is that in the middle and late 1990s, some literary historians, when sorting out the history of literature in the new period, gradually classified the previously unclear writers under the banner of avant-garde. Avant-garde literature now usually refers to the creation of a group of writers in the mid-1980s. Under this banner, there are Yu Hua, Ge Fei, Su Tong, Mo Yan, Hong Feng, Sun Ganlu and Can Xue.
Since 1979, there has been a wave of novel creation with events of national concern as the main content. These creations care about the people around them, their own situation and the situation of the people around them. This wave lasted for five or six years, and literature was particularly vigorous and enthusiastic during this period, and its relationship with the public was unprecedented. But by 1985, when literature was still progressing steadily, people like Acheng and some young people who were keen on writing novels gradually felt something was wrong: everyone was concerned about what the novel was written, but no one cared about how it was written. 1The King of Chess written by Acheng at the end of 1984 and The Temptation of Gangdise written by Ma Yuan at the beginning of 1985 sounded the horn of avant-garde literature. Later, writers such as Mo Yan, Liu Suola, Xu Xing and He Liwei changed the focus of writing from what to write to how to write. Novel methodology is the theme of avant-garde literature movement.
Avant-garde literature "Avant-garde literature" writers' creations are not exactly the same. Ge Fei's novels are elegant and bookish, and his education is the best in our generation. Both Yu Hua and Su Tong are talented people in the south of the Yangtze River, but they are not much comparable. Yu Hua is particularly cruel and neurotic; Su Tong, on the other hand, is gentle and meticulous, and knows more about amorous feelings than women. His writing style is very mature and sophisticated, and "Wives and Concubines" is almost perfect and impeccable. Sun Ganlu's novels are full of fantasy and ethereal poetry. The characters are everywhere, and the words are particularly beautiful. Any paragraph is a poem. The characters in Can Xue's novels are also everywhere, but they are particularly penetrating to read. They live their own lives, completely ignoring the existence of outsiders. Mo Yan's novels are not exquisite at all, and Wang Yang is arbitrary. His creation has always been magnificent and full of vigorous power. These different writers are not satisfied with being detained under the hat of "pioneer". However, history is sometimes so cruel that the title of "avant-garde literature" is positioned on us new writers from 65438 to 0985.
Avant-garde literature-the reason for its rise
Sun Ganlu, a professor of Chinese Department in Zhang Yiwu and Peking University, wrote in the second issue of Mountain Flowers that the so-called "avant-garde literature" is not a clear concept, but a vague existence with high fuzziness. It has many different manifestations. Wang Meng's "stream of consciousness" novels, the discussion about "drama view", the rise of "misty poetry" and "post-new poetry tide", Acheng and others' "root-seeking literature", the debate about "modernism" and the re-understanding of western modernism are undoubtedly the key parts of avant-garde literature. The general history of literature, from the novels of Liu Suola and Xu Xing to the novels of Ma Yuan, Hong Feng, Su Tong, Ge Fei, Yu Hua and Sun Ganlu, should be said to be a trend and clue in this historical atmosphere. In the 1980s, just out of the nightmare of "Cultural Revolution", a promise of individual subject liberation and individual freedom, which was divorced from the social and cultural choice of planned economy, began to become the theme of literature. From "scar literature" to "reflective literature" and then to "avant-garde literature", it is actually a "subjective" spiritual path of self-pursuit. This "subjectivity" is developed from two directions in "avant-garde literature": one is the expression of a radical individual's new way of life divorced from the planned economy, and the other is to return to the May 4th tradition of questioning "national character" through "seeking roots". The liberation of the subject is not only reflected in form, but also directly reflected in form. This form of pursuit is also a satisfaction and completion of the imagination of "pure literature" since the May 4th Movement. From an international perspective, the world is still in the cold war mode, and China is a land of hope and a new discovery of the West. The emergence of "avant-garde literature" provided possible resources for this new imagination, so many western sinologists rushed to translate and introduce China's "avant-garde literature", and many writers of "avant-garde literature" at that time also became the symbol of international "China" writing.
Avant-garde literature-the cause of decline
Why did "avant-garde literature" gradually fade out after entering the 1990s? Critics have different interpretations of this.
Zhai Hong, an associate professor at the School of Chinese Studies of Guangxi University for Nationalities, wrote in the No.1 1 issue of Southern Literature that his own immaturity and obvious imitation of western novels made the language experiment of avant-garde novels a "language game" that many people felt bored from the beginning. Therefore, avant-garde novels are inevitably in a lonely and marginal position soon after their rise, and "avant-garde novels" seem to be synonymous with "unsalable novels".
Zhang Yiwu believes that the 1990s turned the abstract "subject" in the 1980s into a real "individual" with globalization and marketization, and the transformation of "avant-garde literature" is inevitable. On the one hand, pioneers have become an absolute minority of "pure literature". For example, the development of avant-garde poetry is an increasingly special "circle" process; On the other hand, it is moving towards an elegant popular literature that is interdependent with new middle-class readers. What these readers need is literature between radical avant-garde experiments and popular novels. The promise of "avant-garde literature" to liberation in the planned economy era seems to have been realized now, but this liberation is at the expense of the disappearance of "avant-garde literature". In a new globalized and market-oriented society, this "pioneer" has to give way to a "consumer".
The change of avant-garde literary style
Life (poster) entered the 1990s. Su Tong and Yu Hua successively published novels such as Rice, Wives and Concubines, Living, and Xu Sanguan Selling Blood, which indicated that avant-garde writers weakened formal experiments and text games, began to pay attention to the fate of characters, realized human existence and soul with more plain language, and returned to the text with realistic depth and humanistic care. Many commentators believe that this is the popularization of avant-garde writers in order to cater to the public, and this turn marks the return of avant-garde literature to the realistic tradition.
The change of avant-garde writers' creation-from attaching importance to form to significance-is not a simple return. There are many realistic factors in their works, but the treatment of themes and themes is quite different from the realistic method. If we say that from the very beginning, the avant-garde writers' subversion and deconstruction of traditional literary forms are inherently deficient, which is rooted in the realistic soil where avant-garde literature germinates. After 1970s, in China, with the disappearance of divine aura and the migration of ethnic consciousness to individual consciousness, "man" is not only faced with the challenge of real economic trends, but also impacted by various foreign cultural trends, and the ideals and values that people have always believed in and advocated are inevitably questioned. The external historical situation has provided a new turning point for the history of literature. Coupled with the conscious power of artistic form change that has always existed in the history of literature, the avant-garde has absorbed spiritual energy from existential philosophy and the works of masters such as Borges and embarked on a journey of exploration. They are by no means lacking the traditional practical ability or trying to keep up with the fashion, but an inner spiritual need drives them. The radical gesture made by the avant-garde actually shows by actions that only by subverting the old tradition can we open up a new battlefield, which has its inevitable rationality. In the 1990s, with the reform of economic and political system and the establishment of market economy, China completed the 200-year industrialization process in the West in a short time. Oval industrial expansion makes the society full of ridiculous human feelings, but the spiritual temperament in life is poor and powerless, and external conditions once again provide an opportunity for literature to turn. How to look at ordinary or abnormal life forms and reflect people's real pain and various possibilities of human existence in a more appropriate way has become a problem that avant-garde writers must face. ? Furthermore, the exploration and innovation of art forms show the self-realization and freedom improvement of the creative subject, but the loss of the subject discourse, the disappearance of human nature and the narrative of history make the avant-garde writers lost in the subject spirit. Avant-garde writers play a rebellious game against the deep pattern of social history in the form of narration and win the name of "pioneer" The avant-garde works reveal the lack of center, depth, uncertainty, fragmentation and other styles, which make them show postmodern symptoms. However, the emergence of postmodern narrative theory and its practice in China is not the natural result of the local social and cultural development in China, but the foreign acceptance of China avant-garde writers in the sense of intertextuality. From the works of Borges, Faulkner and Heller, they suddenly realized that the original novel could be written in another way, so to some extent, avant-garde writers first imitated its narrative level. The timely turn of avant-garde literature is not an accidental return, migration or even confluence from postmodernism to modernism. They finally walked out of Borges' territory and "showed the characteristics of China's avant-garde literature as a whole".
Avant-garde literature-impact assessment
The avant-garde literature of Brothers (Yu Hua) originated in the middle and late 1980s, and it has been nearly 20 years. Although some works are still published today, most readers have become estranged from it. This shows the cruel side of history. We are repositioning and judging personnel, and gradually screening and eliminating some writers' works. Those writers who are commonly called "avant-garde literature" today, at that time, their respective creations, tendencies, methods and attitudes were actually completely different. If we just talk in general terms, it will cover up the subtle differences between writers in writing and aesthetics, which is a very dangerous thing.
Yu Wensuo 'an, a professor at Harvard University, pointed out in his works on Tang poetry that we should not look for the standards of that era from the greatest poets of that era, but should observe the poets of that era from the universal standards of that era. Judging from the social environment at that time, avant-garde literature was heresy as soon as it appeared, and many people doubted such writing style and content, although it has been summarized as a literary phenomenon and has become a part of history.
Nowadays, the writing of avant-garde writers has also undergone great changes, including the changes in writing, the influence of the big environment on personal situation, and finally the attitude in the writers' works. And our previous works are also brought by our experience, reading, judgment and imagination before writing these works.
It is a way to look at the meaning of literary works from the perspective of literary history. But there can be other ways. Literature and theory care about different things. Theory directly generalizes things through abstract thinking activities, while literature never speaks directly. In a sense, it appeals to the senses. Western new criticism, text analysis and other methods are all channels to contact literary works, which can help people enter literary works and discover the meaning of literature. However, novels, or literature and art in a broad sense, affect people in many ways, so how to establish its meaning. When the audience comes into contact with literary works, they need to put aside their logical and rational thinking and use their senses at some moments. There are many subtle details in literary works, which sometimes accumulate imperceptibly, or form a certain relationship with other details in structure, which will suddenly make people "heartbroken". This way of reading can transcend many critical methods and discover the meaning of works.
Twenty years later, if we look back at the significance of avant-garde literature to China literature, its changes and influences, and its own problems, can we look at avant-garde literature from a more objective and rational perspective?
Although "avant-garde literature" has gone out, the reflection on "avant-garde literature" is still of great significance to the development of China literature at present and in the future. Zhai Hong believes that the language experiment of avant-garde novels has promoted the change of narrative concept, and accumulated valuable experience for the development of literature with new novel texts. Avant-garde writers try to make their writing close to people's living conditions from different ways and levels, and try to restore the original feelings of life in their understanding of the world. The language experiment of the novel highlights an important issue, that is, how modern Chinese writing conveys the personal feelings of modern China people. Avant-garde novels are valuable in a pioneering spirit, which is a youthful spirit that dares to innovate. Therefore, the current withdrawal of "avant-garde literature" is not necessarily a "Guangling San".
Avant-garde literature-representative writer
all one's life
Yu Hua Yu Hua, a native of Haiyan, Zhejiang Province,1was born in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province on April 3, 1960, and then moved to Haiyan County with his parents. After graduating from high school, Yu Hua became a dentist because her parents were doctors. After five years, he gave up medicine and joined the county cultural center and Jiaxing Federation of Literary and Art Circles. Since then, he has formed an indissoluble bond with his own creation. Yu Hua studied in a postgraduate class jointly organized by Lu Xun College of Literature in Beijing and Chinese Department of Beijing Normal University. Yu Hua began to publish novels on 1984. He is a representative figure of avant-garde novels with the same fame as Ye and Su Tong. His works have been translated into English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Dutch, Norwegian, Korean and Japanese, and published abroad. Among them, Living and Xu Sanguan Selling Blood were selected by hundreds of critics and literary editors as "the ten most influential works in the 1990s". He won the Italian Greenzana Carver Literature Award (1998) and the Australian Suspense Literature Award (2002). He is the author of a collection of short stories: Going Out at Eighteen, Things in Smoke, Novels, Living, Shouting in the Drizzle and Trembling. He also wrote many essays and literary and musical reviews.
Since Yu Hua published his debut novel "Going Out at Eighteen", he has caused a lot of shock and concern in the literary world and readers with his highly experimental works, and he has thus become a representative of China's avant-garde novels.
In fact, Yu Hua is not a prolific writer. His works, including short stories, novellas and novels, add up to no more than 800,000 words. He is famous for his exquisiteness. Most of his works are true and hard-written, with pure and meticulous narration, breaking the daily language order, organizing a self-sufficient discourse system, and on this basis, constructing a strange, grotesque, secret and cruel text world and text truth independent of the outside world. Yu Hua once said to himself: "I feel that all my creations are trying to be closer to reality. This truth of mine is not the truth in life. I think life is actually unreal, and life is a mixture of truth and falsehood. "
"To Be Alive" is a work of Yu Hua's changing style. In the narrative aspect, he gave up the avant-garde brushwork and moved towards the narrative way of traditional novels. But structurally, he can still give readers a sense of drama and imagination.
Main work
Stars, going out at the age of 18, April 3rd Incident, 1986, mistakes by the river, a reality, bloody plum blossoms, Sisyphus, smoke, classical love, teenagers at dusk, cries in drizzle, being alive, and Xu San.