It never occurred to me that Chinese majors should dabble in the whole intangible superstructure, such as religion, law, philosophy, art, society, psychology, human beings and so on. Let me get surprises everywhere: experience emotions, appreciate art, broaden my horizons, reflect on life, build a whole set of theoretical systems, and make common sense and vague forms rational and traceable.
One afternoon, a video called "Literary Theory" was recommended on the home page. I know that theory has been boring. Psychology and rhetoric of life are at home. Every time I open it with enthusiasm, it becomes a good hypnotic device, but I am still tirelessly attracted and naively believe that one day I can break the boring wall. Fortunately, this wall is easily broken by Mr. Yang Ning now.
The video is a screen video of freshmen in Chinese Department, with 32 episodes. From the beginning of literary theory to the end of the relationship between literature and readers, I watched six episodes for 45 minutes in two days. Why is the progress a little slow? Because I can't open multiples and need to pause, I recorded tens of thousands of words in six classes. At this time, I suddenly felt that it was meaningful to buy a new computer. I hope I can't record every word of the teacher. He is not a porter of knowledge, but a magician. We know that the concept itself is very boring, difficult to understand, and has no practical significance. The textbook will use a longer and stranger sentence to explain a strange short concept. Teacher Yang, on the other hand, uses vivid and lifelike language and body, coupled with ever-changing emotions, to bring you an unforgettable epiphany.
For example, when he explained "literary characteristics", he moved from the aesthetic characteristics of literature to the universality of aesthetics, which led to the concept of "non-conceptual universality". Are you dizzy? Follow his logic and story, not only not around, but also clear and profound.
He picked up the mineral water bottle on the table while talking. I thought he was just a natural and relaxed performance, but I didn't expect him to ask at the right time: "Students, I said this bottle is transparent." The students nodded, and the teacher popped up a joke: "Don't tell me that some parts of it are still opaque, it is transparent!" " He went on to say "I said it was cold" (well, there is nothing wrong with it, I am looking forward to the next words, but the teacher's tone feels a little idle, so I am sorry to digress)
The point is-
The teacher said with emphasis, "I think it's beautiful!" "
He watched everyone stir for a while, and then said, "Some of you will say, beautiful fart." (That's right)
Then it leads to a truth-I think it's cool. If you say it's not cool, it doesn't matter. Neither cool nor hot is true, but I think it's beautiful. If you say it's not beautiful, I'll be anxious with you.
When I think about it carefully, I suddenly understand the word "universality without concept", which is the characteristic of beauty (aesthetics). Just like having dinner with friends, I often say that a dish is spicy, but I don't think it is spicy, but I never want to persuade my friends to change their views, and my friends won't take it seriously. I said it's not spicy, and no one will stay after an intuitive feeling. But aesthetics, which has no concept and is very subjective, is the sum of all one's experiences (as Teacher Yang and Teacher Li Dan said). Its natural hope is recognized, and people who want to open up will comfort themselves and feel beautiful. But beauty itself remains.
For example, the teacher said humorously that she overheard the conversation between two female students. One recommended TV series to another, and the other replied, "I never watch domestic TV series." Teachers doubt that there is a contempt chain when watching TV, and those who watch American dramas look down on those who watch Japanese dramas (Japanese dramas > Korean dramas > Hong Kong and Taiwan dramas > domestic dramas). Girls can say they don't like it, but they unconsciously "never …" subconsciously put themselves in. He warned everyone-don't deny aesthetics when chatting, or you will end up hacking each other.
This reminds the Chinese department to keep a cold attitude at all times and borrow various interdisciplinary knowledge systems to help it analyze, reflect and explain its essence. Because-Chinese department is not to train writers, but to decide who is a writer. A cool sentence, provided that you have a complete literary theory system.
There was laughter from the audience, so I also knew the jury status and evaluation criteria of the Nobel Prize, the reason why Mo Yan won Haruki Murakami, the basis for writing the history of literature, and the huge theoretical system and mountains of books behind the Chinese Department.
The teacher said that the Chinese department can't choose books, it has to look at everything. It does not shy away from looking at its own beauty, the love of sages, and love O2O. Of course, great works never fail, and the purpose of seeing beautiful women is not for rock candy, but to analyze why a boy in Shuai Shuai changed when he saw another boy in Shuai Shuai. Why is this routine tried and tested in today's society? So he asked, "Does it have anything to do with the disappointment and failure of the relationship between the two sexes in the present society? Is it related to the one-child policy? " Wait a minute. This is the purpose of reading such books by the Chinese Department, tracing the source and perfecting the theory.
In addition to long knowledge, I also heard a knowledgeable Chinese teacher talk about beauty and analyze its value. This is an interesting experience.
He also talked about the lion king, wandering earth and others, their hidden values and the formation of human values.
When the culture we are in contact with permeates ourselves imperceptibly in any form, the aesthetics and concepts will be gradually improved, and once the ideology is formed, it will be indestructible. This once again explains why we can't deny the aesthetics of others.
Back to the essence of literature-polysemy of language. In literary theory, symbol itself is a world (symbol is guidance), so the teacher came when he spoke, from Qu Yuan to the late Tang Dynasty.
The chrysanthemum in "Drink Mulan Dew in the morning, and stay in England in the late autumn" is a noble word (chrysanthemum is the guide, expensive gas is the guide); Tao Yuanming, the chrysanthemum in "Picking Chrysanthemums under the East Hedgerow, Seeing Nanshan Leisurely" has the character of a hermit again; Meng Haoran, the chrysanthemum "I'll come back when it's chrysanthemum time" has become a symbol of the Double Ninth Festival in autumn. Du Fu, the chrysanthemum of "two chrysanthemums shed tears every other day, and the boat alone is the heart of home and country", also represents the feelings of long years; Later, at the end of the Tang Dynasty, in Huang Chao, the phrase "Golden Flowers in the City" was murderous.
The teacher said that the reason for the poet's decline after the prosperous Tang Dynasty was not lack of creativity, but the unbearable writing. Therefore, there is a saying that there is no code to follow after the Tang Dynasty, and poetry cannot be understood after being quoted again.
Can such a class be unattractive? Rich and interesting, it not only understands the concept, but also understands the inevitability that "thoughts are expressed in words and are also restricted by words". Being introduced by several poems, I learned that there was no canon after the Tang Dynasty, which once again proved the "reflective" nature of literary theory. Perhaps the difficulty of contemporary creation lies in the rapid exhaustion of the meaning of words. After all, literature has to embody another important feature-defamiliarization.
The first time I heard strangeness was in an interpretation by Zhang Ailing, who was good at describing strange and accurate artistic conception. Who wants to be defamiliarized has long been one of the necessities of literary works, which creates a small reading obstacle, lengthens readers' thinking time and enhances their sense of experience. For example, "a person was beaten black and blue", because the description is too familiar, there are only a few words left at a glance, and Xu Zhimo will say "his watch is embedded in his wrist." The pain can be imagined.
When the teacher talked about "realistic description of details", she took Zhang Ailing as an example. He came up with a half-life story, quickly summed up the main line and interpreted the bridge of a telephone booth. After many years, Gu and Shen finally spoke by phone. On the phone, Gu kept laughing and laughing. After hanging up the phone, she found her lips stuck to her gums. The teacher focused on the details of the lips sticking to the gums, which was so real that it gave me goose bumps. He felt that Zhang Ailing must have experienced it before she described it like this. Although it is fiction, the sense of reality is not bad at all, so she brought out a famous saying-art is the illusion of reality.
There is also Zhang Ailing's clever handling of emotions-"I thought I was different from my sister, but I didn't expect that I was just a step late and bowed my head to face life."
I love teachers so much! In order to let everyone understand a concept, it is really great to throw out a plot, a line and a poem from time to time, and then give it accurate emotion.
Speaking of the virtuality and emotionality of literature, the teacher came to Amway again, from the April day on earth, the time when there were no birds in the mountains and no footprints in the formalin. ...
This is a scene of April day on earth. When Xu Zhimo met Lin, he had so much to say that he didn't know where to start. His eyes met for a long time, and suddenly it began to rain outside. Lin said to him, "It's raining. You should go back." Xu Zhimo said, "It's raining, so I can't go back."
One line brings out all desires and emotions, and the bondage paved in front breaks out here. (The author borrows the environment to add artistic atmosphere. )
Hearing this, I feel my emotions reverberate for a long time. Literary theory tells me that the use of images will strengthen the reader's experience and stimulate the imagination, just like opening a blocked nerve.
On the contrary, it has been said for a long time that "life is precious, love is more expensive, so you can have both when you have time", but because of good translation, literal translation of foreign languages is a simple truth. Even if the translation is good, it lacks aesthetic value, because it is straightforward and lacks imagination.
However, literariness is dynamic and relative. Compared with A Dream of Red Mansions, Historical Records is weak in literariness, because its fiction and imagination are not strong, and The Analects of Confucius is weak in literariness, because its defamiliarization is not strong.
Reading literature with these understandings (no need to deliberately) is like waking up from ignorance, not recognizing it more rationally, but polishing more beautiful scenery and experiencing more emotions.
At this point, I have been verbose and there are too many interesting details, so I don't intend to write them down one by one. Marxism also has a superstructure, and the "alienation" of western Marxism is not analyzed here. I can't feel the commonness of Qin and Han dynasties in "Bright Moon in Qin Dynasty" and the clever use of images in "Spring Breeze in February Like Scissors". Record the last one: "real world" and "literary world", because this is of great significance to me, which can be said to remind me of a certain mode of thinking.
Since ancient times, experts love to do one thing-textual research is true.
Take Wang Wei's "Bird Singing Stream" as an example: when people are idle, osmanthus flowers fall, when the night is quiet, the mountains are empty in spring, the birds are surprised in the moon, and the spring stream is ringing.
Some experts question how to write autumn and spring in this tense. So I went to study it. Later, I really studied that there is a kind of flower called "Spring Osmanthus fragrans", also called "Mountain Room Flower". When it was born in spring, experts were relieved, and poetry changed from "there is a problem" to "no problem".
Another example is Zhang Ji's "a night-mooring near maple bridge": On a frosty night, the river breeze, fishing and fire sleep, Hanshan Temple outside Gusu City, and the midnight bell goes to a passenger ship.
Experts say it's getting dark. Can crows still bark? It's midnight. Does the temple still ring bells? (This question was put forward by Ouyang Xiu), so the experts went to investigate it again, and sure enough, they found a black body mountain, and Sad Sleep is also a mountain, so they came to the conclusion that the black body in the poem is not the crow's cry, but Sad Sleep is also a mountain.
So logic is "normal".
But can this really solve the problem? The teacher doesn't think so. The truth of literature is not truth, but realism! The purpose of literature is to express and convey feelings, not to report facts.
When the moon came out, the birds were shocked. This is a very quiet atmosphere. The petals of osmanthus fragrans are very small, so there is a silent imagination of falling flowers. All the images emphasize the overall "quietness". If you feel it, it is "true". If you really understand Osmanthus fragrans as a "mountain flower", you will find that the flower is three times larger than Osmanthus fragrans, and the artistic conception is destroyed. On the contrary, it lost its literary significance.
The essence of art is not to describe reality truthfully at all. To appreciate poetry, we should follow its laws, not the realistic logic. Literature itself is a world. If the poem is well written, the temple will ring the bell in the middle of the night and change its name to Hanshan Temple, and then the nameless mountain will have names such as Wuti and Sad Sleep.
"It's not that you believe in God that you kneel down, but that you begin to believe in God after you kneel down."
Only by understanding the essential purpose of a thing and observing its laws can we enter its world, and we don't have to look at everything with fixed thinking compared with truth, fact, science and convention.
Common sense is like the shadow in Plato's "Cave Metaphor", where the sun rises and sets, and a carton of cat food. How do you know it won't suddenly break?