About the Author
Li Hao, male, born in 1971 in Hebei, China, has been a small club member for eight years. He has always been obsessed with fantasy and fiction, obsessed with uselessness, studied art and writing, has mediocre qualifications, and has been oscillating between arrogant self-confidence and deep inferiority.
bookworm. Borges has been quoted repeatedly as saying: "Heaven should be like a library", and heaven without books can never gain trust in him; "I have experienced very little, but I have experienced a lot." From the wisdom of the ancients and contemporaries, he thought that he could attain spiritual, experiential richness and abundance, supplement some of the defects in experience, and, of course, partly.
A man with a fascination with wisdom and skill, a firm and deep skeptic. One, the weak, an enemy of the self; a writer who insists on turning his writing efforts into a book of wisdom, who is not afraid to "write to the infinite minority"; a man who maintains pride and prejudice and always tries to correct his pride and prejudice; one, who is "silent and unswervingly insists on a stubborn personal position", who does not change with time and fate. He is the author of the novel collection "Who Was Born to be an Assassin", "Side Mirror", "Blue Test Paper", and the novel "Rugui Hotel". He has won the Lu Xun Literature Award, the Zhuang Chongwen Literature Award, the Pu Songling Literature Award, the October Literature Award, the People's Literature Award, the Sun Li Literature Award, and so on.
Source: Flower City
Can literature be taught? It seems to me that it should not be a problem, because there is no sense of doubt: literature can be taught, and it does need to be taught. No one is born a writer, a master. If there is no doubt about this, then there should be no doubt that literary skills can be imparted, and all success has a learning process, and literature is certainly no exception.
However, it is deliberate and useful to raise such questions for discussion. Because this common sense is not understood and accepted by all people, because in our country, it is a stubborn phenomenon to obscure, unknowable, and metaphysical to make everything deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. In the West, there are at least ten thousand squares between one and ten thousand, and there can be more subdivisions between one and two squares, and it needs to be investigated, how is it more accurate to investigate this point, in the end, the position between one and ten thousand; and in our East, one and ten thousand are vague, interchangeable, two or two and three in life, and all things are like this... Of course, there are pros and cons to both approaches, and to say such a thing is not to flatter anything; but when it comes to the teaching of literary creation, I may prefer the Western way.
Literary writing should be opened into a special course, starting from many aspects of writing, such as how to use words, how to be strange, such as how to tell stories, to tell stories vividly and beautifully, such as how to design characters, how to make each character have a relationship, and become a line of connection, such as... To be honest, I don't know where the argument that literary skills cannot be taught and that writers do not need to be "cultivated" comes from and what kind of theoretical basis there is, but as a writer and editor, I see more of the terrible consequences of this "theory". Too many creative writers (especially grassroots writers) have not entered literature for decades because of the lack of training in literary skills, although there is sometimes no lack of sparkle in their writing.
Too many writers are too weak in their basic skills, they can only tell popular stories, and there are too many omissions, and the words are really like chewing wax; too many literary critics do not understand literary skills, lack literary aesthetic ability, and they talk about only chewing gum after being chewed ten thousand times by philosophy, sociology, and ethics, and cannot be pasted with the text, cannot guide reading, and are not interesting. I have said something too harsh, that is, at least 80% of writers, critics, and editors do not understand literature today, despite their greater and smaller fame and occupying positions. How did it come to this? Because we lack classes to teach literary skills, improve literary aesthetic ability and appreciation level.
Of course, as far as my personal writing is concerned, I also feel that I lack many shortcomings of "this lesson", and I have to rely more on hard work and taste to try to understand what has become a regular thing in my predecessors, and sometimes, like Wang Xiaobo's somewhat mentally retarded cousin, I have repeatedly declared smugly: I know a very good technique! I will order a buckle! But I didn't know that the skill I had worked so hard to obtain was old knowledge in others, especially in the case of great writers, and it was not worth mentioning. If there had been "this lesson," I wouldn't have had to take as many detours, I wouldn't have to put in that much effort, which could have been used in more valuable places. During my work at Beijing Literature, I edited a column with friends that benefited me a lot: "Text Collection", asked some writers and scholars to recommend short stories that he thought were the best, said the reasons for the recommendation and made eyebrow comments - reading these eyebrow criticisms made me feel a lot of emotions, and sometimes, it would make me suddenly realize how huge my original reading misses were, and I would have a feeling of sudden enlightenment when I noticed it again. Next to my pillow was a copy of Nabokov's Literary Lectures, which he had taught literature at American universities, and he had reacquainted me with literary masterpieces that I had read many times: Madame Bovary, Metamorphosis... Of course, I do not agree with all his understanding of these masterpieces, all of his understanding of literature, but in terms of skill, but in terms of how to complete the personal "style and structure", how to use "the bone between the two shoulder blades" to feel the tremor, appreciate the beauty of literary writing, Nabokov gave me too much lesson. And it also brought me great remorse: if I had read this book in my eighteens and nineteens and twenties, and listened to a literature class like Nabokov's "Literary Lectures", my writing would certainly have been much more perfect, and some of my fixed mistakes and shortcomings might have been corrected and remedied.
Literature, especially modern literature, has become more and more inclined to "science", especially structure, story design, especially the use of some novel techniques, especially the dizzying stylistic practices of many writers since the "literary explosion" of the last century... While emphasizing the originality of the writer and "discovery is the only morality of the novel", Milan Kundera also reminded us that "a work should be a synthesis of the literary experience of the predecessors", to do this, of course, first of all, to read a large number of books, and having a "literature class" guidance and analysis will definitely make us take fewer detours, less prejudice and error, less arrogant stubbornness.
When I say that the professor of literary creation should not be a problem, this is not only from the experience of the West, in fact, in China, in our ancient times, it has always been the case. I guess that literary creation is not taught, probably because of the understanding of the richness, diversity, difference, and non-reproducibility of art - music, fine art, Chinese calligraphy, these arts also have richness, diversity, difference, non-reproducibility, and the brush and rice paper used in China for writing are already doomed to self-replication because of the particularity of the material, and any calligrapher and painter is unlikely to copy the existing works exactly the same - but what is the most important emphasis on our calligraphy and painting? The first is copying, copying, first of all, look at the provenance of your pen and ink. Why is it that literature, which is also in the realm of art, becomes unspeakable? You must know that the emphasis of calligraphy and painting on artistic personality is more stringent! I want to know which writer can write a great work without learning and tasting the experience of his predecessors, and if so, please tell me, and I invite you to eat the whole table. Black and white.
The famous poet and Russian writer Akhmatova once proudly declared that I am a craftsman, that I know the art. She certainly has more than just skills, but the emphasis is instructive. Moreover, the literary creation class will not only teach you how to use technology without learning aesthetics and possible attitudes towards the world and human beings.
Of course, the professor of "this lesson" is really difficult, the requirements for teachers are really high, but therefore it is not done, but because of this, the "academic" of our university is rigid like a piece of wood, which is even more harmful.
As for saying that with this lesson, all people can become writers and write great works, I think it is another rather fallacy, and there seems to be a little bit of a "Great Leap Forward" flavor in it. I am not against the whole people writing, reading more books, thinking more questions, writing out their true thoughts and feelings, is a happy thing, but we must also see that "writers" actually have a threshold, and with time has become higher and higher - some so-called writers in the past may not seem to be writers now, but at most popular writers. With this lesson, there is no doubt that it will improve the people's literary appreciation ability and writing level, will make some people understand aesthetics, and will also enable some writers to have a higher artistic standard, and this improvement can be universal - but we must also be clear, "poetry has different materials, non-books are also, poetry is interesting, non-rational", creative artistic labor can not be universal to the whole people, this point, can never be. Just like, not everyone who learns mathematics, chemistry, will become mathematicians, chemists, scientists, can become a certain family is always a minority, the United States has a literary creation class and quite popular not all listeners have become writers, not to mention big writers. However, with "this lesson", writers will certainly be more out, and the level of public appreciation will certainly be higher, not so that we will always slip on the mediocre and low-end.