Title: Literature and the Ideology of Space: How the Beijing School Was Constructed in Modern Chinese Literature 1
Abstract: IntroductionThe Beijing School-or Jingpai-was an important literary school in modern Chinese literature. It came into being in late 1920s when tide of May Fourth cultural movement receded and when Leftist literature and Shanghai School of literature came to dominate literary world in China. The Leftist writers advocated that literature should serve revolutionary cause and it should embrace politics and ideologies. The Shanghai School writers, primarily based in Shanghai that was commercial and cosmopolitan centre in China at time, promoted modem, commercial and cosmopolitan values in their writings and accept commercialization of literature. The Beijing School writers, mostly living in northern Chinese cities such as Beijing, Tianjin and Qingdao, were opposed to close relationship between literature and politics on one hand and to commercialization of literature on other. The Beijing School writers, such as Zhou Zuoren, Shen Congwen, Fei Ming, Ling Shuhua, Lin Huiyin, Xiao Qian, Li Jianwu and Zhu Guangqian, pursued ideal of literature of humanity, independent of politics and commercialization, and tended to recreate in their writings an idealized rural China where their ideal literary values were located and embodied.Recent studies on Beijing School have focused mainly on works of its writers, their literary values and contributions to modern Chinese literature. There are only a few researches on school as a whole, taking as its focus school ' s historical formation and its relationships to other schools such as Leftist and Shanghai School. My paper will take Beijing School as a whole and, using relationship between literature and space as central line of investigation, examine how school was constructed and reconstructed in modern Chinese literature. In process, it will analyse writings on Beijing School, especially comments by Zhou Zuoren, Shen Congwen, Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Feng Naichao and others, and it will touch upon early 1930s debates on Beijing School versus Shanghai School.Ideology of Space and Literature of FlumanityThe significance of relationship between literature and space, asserts Zhou Zuoren in his 1923 article Place and Literature and Art written for one of his home province newspapers, is not to be found in the regionalism that Chinese often has. Instead, by quoting from Also sprach Zarathustra where Nietzsche passionately calls for a loyalty to land, Zhou argues that importance of relationship lies well in such a loyalty to land, for he believes that in whatever sense human beings are always children of land. This loyalty to land, according to him, could also be understood on basis of traditional Chinese idea offengtu, a common sense of close tie between a man and natural conditions and social customs of a place where he lives. In such a distinction between regionalism which is closely related to a locally collectivized and narrow- minded attachment to a place and a loyalty to land which stresses an individualized and life - empowering bonding to a place, Zhou endeavours to emphasize a general yet also individualized relationship between man, literature and place. However, what was troubling Zhou was that people at time like too much life up in air and they love to live in beautiful but meaningless theories, just like people before who would like to live in old Confucian books. To Zhou, this is no doubt a regretful situation. Thus he calls upon writers of time to come down to ground, let breath and flavour of land and mud penetrate their arteries and veins, and express them in words. Such words of and from land are in his mind real thought, literature and art. Zhou further argues that this land- based way of writing applies not only to native literature and art that focus on descriptions of regionalized local life but it applies to all literature and art. …
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-04-01
Language: en
Type: article
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