On December 18, 2021, the workshop "The Range of New Cultures : How Historical Synthesis Is Possible" was successfully held at the Middle Art Museum. On the basis of the publication of two new books, Ji Jianqing's "The Position of New Culture: A Collection of Literature and Thought on May Fourth" and Yuan Yidan's "A New Cultural Movement That Emerged", the workshop focused on the new ideas and trends in the study of The New Culture of May Fourth in recent years. The guests present included: Wang Dongjie (Professor of The Department of History, Tsinghua University), Liu Daxian (Researcher of the Institute of Ethnic Literature of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Li Yuyang (Lecturer of the School of Literature of Beijing Normal University), Song Shengquan (Associate Professor of the School of Literature of Chinese University), Zhang Lihua (Associate Professor of the Department of Chinese, Peking University), Ji Jianqing (Associate Professor of the Department of Chinese, Peking University), Jin Li (Professor of the Department of Chinese of Fudan University), Meng Qingshu (Professor of the College of Literature of Capital Normal University), Yuan Yidan (Associate Professor of the College of Literature, Capital Normal University), Yuan Xianxin (Associate Professor, Department of Chinese, Tsinghua University), Xu Jiagui (Assistant Researcher, Institute of History, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences), Gao Bo (Associate Professor, School of History, Chinese Min University). In addition, Professor Chen Pingyuan of the Department of Chinese of Peking University attended the roundtable discussion of the workshop.
Lu Yinghua, director of the Middle Art Museum, delivered a welcome speech. Li Yuyang introduced the main theme of this workshop. In the past two or three decades, the study of the May Fourth new culture has accumulated many new results, and even formed a new paradigm. The publication of Ji Jianqing's "The Position of New Culture: A Collection of Literature and Thought on May Fourth" and Yuan Yidan's "A New Cultural Movement That Emerged" reflects the efforts of a new generation of scholars to dialogue with the New Culture Movement. As a "living tradition", the real significance of the new culture is the ever-present intervention of China and the world from the late Qing Dynasty onwards. The word "range" in the theme of the workshop shows that the new cultural movement is closely related to the fate of China's past, present and future. This discussion of the research related to the new cultural movement, the guests from different disciplinary backgrounds, hope to bring a new sense of academic direction and the possibility of historical understanding.
Group photo of the participating scholars
The first unit was hosted by Wang Dongjie. Gao Bo gave a report entitled "The Historical Depth of the New Culture." He argues that the word "range" points to the traditional and modern characteristics of the New Culture Movement. In terms of "shooting", the new cultural movement has two sides, both the arrow shooter and the recipient of the arrow, the athlete who received the arrow when the movement occurred was a scholar, and in the past ten years, the new culture and May Fourth have also been arrows targets, and they have been shot all over the body. In terms of "Cheng", Ji Jianqing tries to grasp the new cultural movement in a longer historical process, while also paying attention to the spatial scale problem; Yuan Yidan pays more attention to the aspect of the new cultural movement pointing to the present. The last article in Ji Jianqing's book, "The Genealogy and Possibilities of the Discourse on "Early Modern China"", discusses the problems of modern and early modern times, and history also has the problem of modern and modern endpoints, after the reform and opening up, the modern endpoints moved from the May Fourth Movement to the Xinhai Revolution, which is not only an academic process, but also has strong ideological and political factors behind it. The Xinhai Revolution stood on the extended line of the late Qing Dynasty, while the background of the late Qing Revolution was the retro movement, advocating a return to the Ming and Qing dynasties; the "May Fourth" was determined to bid farewell to the past. From the perspective of personal life history, from May Fourth to 1923, 1923 to September 18, 918 to the War of Resistance, these three stages are basically the process of May Fourth youth growing into May Fourth middle age. Yuan Yidan shifted from the study of the new culture of May Fourth at the master's level to the study of the occupied areas during the war period at the doctoral level, facing the problem of the May Fourth youth becoming the middle age of May Fourth. What exactly does it mean for an individual and an era of middle age, to mature or to decay? That's a problem. Yuan Yidan's book mentions that the middle-aged Hu Shi explained the occurrence of the New Culture Movement by "forcing him to Liangshan", emphasized the contingency of the literary revolution, and advocated that this was the choice of a few people, which deviated from Hu Shi's view of youth, when he still advocated the theory of social immortality. As the main party of the new cultural movement, the middle-aged Hu Shi changed the interpretation of the movement itself, but also changed the view of the young Hu Shi, this change from youth to middle age, is not only personal, but also reveals a certain universal "mood of the times".
The title of Jin Li's report is "If the study of the new cultural movement is imagined as a kind of "regional history". He started from The Harvard New History of Modern Chinese Literature edited by Wang Dewei, which focuses on the "interlaced interaction of cultures", the global historical orientation is clearly visible, pays attention to travel and transnationalization, and pushes the beginning of modern literary history to the late Ming Dynasty, shaping the picture of early modern times together with the late Qing Dynasty. Under such a historical picture, how should we reconcile the clamor of the crowd and the feeling of worrying about the country, and how to reconcile consumer modernity with enlightenment modernity? Ji Jianqing's article "What is the "modernity" of "modern literature"? The Genealogy and Possibilities of the "Early Modern China" Discourse believes that China's modern is not the development of early modern literature, early modern literature is consumer, and modern literature is productive. Fudan's teachers have also proposed similar ideas, such as Chen Sihe talking about the "May Fourth" new literature from the perspective of avant-garde and normalcy, and Li Zhensheng traces the origin of modern literature back to the ideological and academic movements of the late Qing Dynasty rather than to late Qing literature. Jin Li noted that Yuan Yidan dissolved the new cultural movement into an undecided new term, put the "fish" back into the "water", placed himself in the historical scene, and paid attention to the opponents and local forces of the new cultural movement. There are also heterogeneities within the new culture, and some have been exiled to the margins, such as the case of Liu Bannong and He Dian, which shows the self-exclusion and repression of the new culture movement. There is an "aftertaste" in Yuan Yidan's research, which is different from thorough knowledge and rigorous evidence, and readers can always feel the author's sympathy for the personal struggles in history through reading. This is actually humanistic care. Drawing on Roussic' view, Kinri sees so-called "regional history" as a research method that distinguishes it from local history and regional history, emphasizing the need for constant movement between local and external, between insider and outsider observers. The academic backgrounds and academic self-consciousness of Ji Jianqing and Yuan Yidan have enabled them to gain a flexible position that is both inside and out of it. For example, the reason why Ji Jianqing insists that "early modern literature" and "modern literature" cannot be confused is obviously to claim the core of the "May Fourth" new literature that cannot be deconstructed, or qualitative prescriptiveness; and Yuan Yidan's review of the "May Fourth" generation's position is precisely to "respond to China's current ideological atmosphere." This understanding and thoughtfulness even contains a kind of responsibility that latecomers dare not resign. Therefore, the works of these two men are not only objectifying May Fourth and problematizing the "New Culture Movement"; but they are by no means different from critics from the outside. The new cultural tradition can constantly give birth to "powerful interlocutors" like Ji Jianqing and Yuan Yidan, which in turn proves that this tradition is a "living tradition" that has neither inner tension nor resilience and room for maneuver.
Xu Jiagui gave a report entitled "Focusing on The Study of New Cultural Movements Outside Peking University and the New Youth". The report starts from the definition of issues, such as the definition of "May Fourth", which has both narrow and broad meanings, which can make obvious distinctions academically. The May Fourth Movement itself can be regarded as diplomatic and political in nature, and can also be regarded as ideological and cultural in nature, and this great elasticity in interpretation is the particularity of the May Fourth Movement relative to the May 30th Movement and the 12.9 Movement in the sequence of the "movement" marked by the Republic of China by date, and in the sequence of major nodes in modern history, it is also the particularity of the May Fourth Movement relative to the Opium War and the Xinhai Revolution. Why is that? This is related to how diplomatic, political, social, ideological, and cultural aspects were different and entangled in the scene of the May Fourth Movement, and it is difficult to answer such questions satisfactorily by focusing only on Peking University and New Youth. The same is true of the ambiguous definition of "new culture (movement)". Scholars today have pointed out that we also need to pay attention to the role of organizations such as the Research Department, the Chinese Revolutionary Party-Kuomintang, and the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association. This includes the following understanding, that is, the purpose of returning to the historical scene, requiring researchers to understand the rise of the new cultural movement as the process of association between the "name" of the new culture and some "reality", for this reason, in addition to the "pre-history" of May Fourth of Peking University and "New Youth", we should also extensively examine the "prehistory" of the May Fourth of the Research Department, the Kuomintang, the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association or other regions and forces, and the "coming and going" and "going to the pulse" in all aspects, as well as the corresponding initiative, are worth discussing, and should not be satisfied with" Peking University is the sun and other places are only worth bathing in the sun" basic schema. For example, Jiang Menglin, who was still in the Jiangsu Provincial Education Association in the first half of 1919, described the new trend at that time not as "sun-drenched", but as a "water flow" schema, the source of which is Peking University, flowing down along the southeast coast, Shanghai and other southeast regions can play the role of hub - just as Wuhan is not the source of the Yangtze River, but it is the hub of the Yangtze River. In addition, in other places outside Beijing, the new cultural movement may have other priorities, for example, it may be closely linked to local autonomy. In this way, the origin and context of the May Fourth new culture should be multi-line, and the research outside of Peking University and "New Youth" should not be satisfied with filling in the gaps in the existing picture pattern, thereby strengthening the existing narrative mode, but should reflect on the existing model itself.
Song Shengquan gave a report entitled "The Dilemma and Breaking of the New Cultural Movement". He pointed out that the first dilemma facing the study of the new cultural movement is that the academic community is studying the new cultural movement in an academic way. The academic approach is decentralized, and scholars are accustomed to making big deals and losing the ability to make big deals. The great historical existence of the New Culture Movement did not occur in a disciplined manner, and research should go back to history, and it should be dealt with without division. The second dilemma facing the study of the New Culture Movement is to reflect on academic research in an academic way. There is now a popular reflective discourse of the inertial modern literary discipline, that is, the current modern literary research has lost the ability to dialogue with the times because it is too fragmented, which has led to the marginalization of modern literary research by the academic community. It is as if the root of the problem lies in the production of academic knowledge. But this reflection itself, in particular, has become a kind of politically correct reflective discourse, and in the final analysis, it is still the production of academic discourse. In the study of the new cultural movement, there are not many famous works that can withstand the test of a century of academic history, and there are many basic historical facts and historical events that need to be cleaned up layer by layer. The third dilemma is that we may no longer be out of the range of the "new culture" today. Range, say effective firing range. In today's era, whether the "new culture" can hit the bullseye outside the range is a test of the researcher's ability. In the past two decades, we have entered the era of pictures and short videos from the era of words, and how to return to an era of word-centricism is a problem that we have to face. It is hard to imagine that the "New Culture Theory" of daring to make an essentialist judgment of the New Culture Movement is reliable without carefully reading the basic literature such as "New Youth", "New Wave", "Weekly Review", "Morning Post", and "Republic of China Daily" and so on several times, and daring to make an essentialist judgment of the New Culture Movement just by reading a few books on the New Culture Movement. The crux of the new cultural movement research lies in the researchers' "breaking the clinging", "no intention, no will, no solidity, no self", that is, "no speculation, no absolute certainty, no stubborn opinion, not self-righteousness", and only then can the research of the new cultural movement be able to gain its greatness, chase its source, look at its flow, and look far ahead.
Workshop site
The second unit was chaired by Meng Qingshu. Zhang Lihua gave a report entitled "The Unfinished Nature of New Culture: From Lu Xun's Novel "Old Master Gao"" to a report. In her report, Zhang Lihua reread Lu Xun's short story "Old Master Gao" written in 1925. In her view, this work, which has always been ignored by researchers, actually contains Lu Xun's thinking on the "unfinished nature" of the new culture in the late Qing Dynasty. In his novel, Lu Xun portrays a protagonist who wanders between "Gao Ganting" and "Gao Erji", placed in the context of the world literature that Lu Xun is familiar with and the era of the new cultural movement of the 1920s, and this protagonist image can be read as an allegory of China's unfinished new culture. This "new culture" takes the new Ideas, New Systems, and New Civilizations of the West as a mirror, but has never really established its own subjectivity, and the vivid narrative of the "Erji Gao Old Master" who finally failed to teach at the girls' school in the novel vividly reveals the division and unfinished nature of this subject that is constantly alienated in the eyes and discourses of others. "The High Master" paradoxically shows that after the establishment of the new modern school system, the traditional teacher's way has been lost, but the new and reasonable teacher-student ethics have not yet been established. There is an article in Ji Jianqing's book entitled "State and Morality: The Crisis of the Republic of the People's Republic and the Occurrence of Ethical Concerns of New Cultural People", which discusses that after the establishment of the new system of the modern state, the corresponding new morality and new ethics have not been established, which is the basis for the emergence of the new cultural movement. Zhang Lihua believes that many of the works in Lu Xun's novel collection "Wandering", including "Old Master Gao", can be read on this extended line, which contains Lu Xun's reflections on the unfinished ethical revolution of modern times.
Yuan Xianxin gave a report entitled "The Short Twentieth Century and the Methodology of Reconstructing Cultural Issues". She pointed out that the research of Ji Jianqing and Yuan Yidan has two characteristics: one feature is that they both have intrinsic literary concerns, paying special attention to stylistic and linguistic issues, but at the same time these concerns present a very broad vision of intellectual history; the other feature is that both scholars are consciously introducing new methods, such as social history and new cultural history. When a scholar is doing research on the New Culture Movement, he will feel that whatever issue he discusses is legal in the field of literature, but if the same way is moved to the 1930s and 1940s, it will no longer be legal, which shows that the New Culture Movement, as the starting point of modern and contemporary literature, has a strange internal tension between it and the discipline of modern and contemporary literature. After the shift in the study style in the 1980s, many discussions tried to break through the shackles of the revolutionary view of history, but scholars found themselves unable to abandon the starting point of the New Culture Movement and the May Fourth Movement. The system of new literature may not be merely a literary system, but within a larger revolutionary system. In this sense, new literature and the concept of "short twentieth century" proposed by Wang Hui can be viewed together. The "short twentieth century" raises the question of how a revolutionary century, beginning with a Chinese perspective, is the emergence of cultural issues of unprecedented importance. Our current explanation for this phenomenon is still insufficient. The new cultural history does open up many issues that were not previously concerned, such as regions, social networks, mechanisms, etc., but when the new cultural history occurred in France, it was a reversal of social history, and its understanding of "culture" did not necessarily coincide completely with the "culture" in the new cultural movement. Yuan Xianxin finally proposed: Looking back at the past now, is it possible to re-propose a methodology about the culture of the twentieth century itself, so as to grasp its core and form a new interpretation of modern and contemporary literature, and even the history of the twentieth century?
Li Yuyang gave a report entitled "Discussion on the Relationship between the Movement to Sort Out the National Past" and the Idea of "New Literature." The interactive relationship between modern scholarship and modern literature, and the historical impact of this interactive relationship, is a huge existence in both academic history and within literary history. Modern scholarship and modern literature, which were created together from the late Qing Dynasty to the May Fourth period, were both important components of China's modernization process. In the New Culture Movement, the pioneers established a holistic plan of mutual support and mutual growth, and in the decades that followed, until today, relying on a common system of knowledge production, dissemination and reception, modern scholarship and modern literature have always coexisted and restricted each other. Existing research has paid insufficient attention to how the two interact in the course of historical progress, and in particular how they are organically and dynamically intervening in their respective core issues. For a long time, the reorganization of the country was simply regarded as a reaction to the literary revolution, or only as an academic extension of the new cultural movement. Most researchers study the influence of the national history on new literature in the context of literary historiography. But this is only one aspect of the relationship between the two. Based on the idea of exploring the interactive form of modern literary research and academic history research, excavating the new cultural movement and sorting out the intergenerational relationship between the national past, Li Yuyang proposed that the relationship between the national history movement and the development of new literary thought in the 1920s should be more comprehensively examined, revealing the historical connection between the two in multiple dimensions, especially focusing on the outline of the new literary ideological genealogy after the literary revolution and the excavation of its internal mechanism. The two articles he wrote, aimed at Wang Guowei and Zhu Ziqing, are the results of the initial practice of this research idea.
Liu Daxian gave a report entitled "The Expansion of 'New Culture':On the Expression and Expression of Intellectuals at the End of the 20th Century." He pointed out that in the process of the establishment of modern China and the Socialist People's Republic, the combination of intellectuals and the alliance of workers and peasants played a role in promoting the victory of the revolution, and after 1949 the emerging republic established a complete set of political systems, especially the unit system and the household registration system, integrating intellectuals into the socialist system. In this process, the "organic intellectuals" who participated in the revolutionary nation-building and some free intellectuals became an organic part of the institutional system, and the intellectual transformation movement adopted because of ideological radicalization in the middle made it a certain degree of squeezing in political status, but for a society that urgently needed "modernization", intellectuals still had their indispensable function with their special professional talents. Therefore, in the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping began to raise the issue of science and technology (knowledge) as a productive force, adjusting the position of intellectuals in the social structure. With the rise of the commodity economy and marketization, China's social structure underwent great changes in the 1990s, and intellectuals felt the depreciation of their own culture and symbolic capital, and the resulting marginalization in economic life and social status. The workers and peasants who are the leading class and the foundation have undergone identity adjustment, and the "intellectuals" who originally belonged to the "working class" are also facing the problem of identity positioning and reconstruction in the overall discourse of "marketization". At the end of the 20th century, intellectuals encountered anxieties and struggles that could be called wars between heaven and man, and tried to establish subjectivity in a changed context, resulting in a series of debates. Liu Daxian believes that the intellectual expression and self-expression since the 1990s can be attributed to three major themes, such as the discursive differences after the dissolution of anti-intellectualism and Enlightenment discourse, the dissatisfaction of secularization and the legalization of daily life, and the professionalism of post consciousness and public appeal. Confined to the established cognitive paradigm, in the formulation of these themes, there are problems such as a one-dimensional understanding of enlightenment, a reduced treatment of daily life and human nature, and a narrowing of publicity. The failure to effectively clean up these problems has led to the self-discourse, controversy and reflection of intellectuals, as well as their literary, social and media images, which have increasingly turned inward, personalized and specialized, showing a state of "noisy aphasia" that is out of touch with mass society. Today, in the era of cultural integration of politics, technology and markets, how to deal with the long-standing dialectical relationship between concreteness and transcendence, certainty and hesitation, and limited and infinite among intellectuals is a proposition put forward by intellectuals since the 1990s that needs further consideration, and it is also the starting point for shaping the "new humanities".
Workshop poster
The third unit was presided over by Liu Daxian. Wang Dongjie gave a report entitled "The New Cultural History of the New Cultural Movement." He pointed out that both Ji Jianqing and Yuan Yidan's books express in the introduction a pursuit of a new value purpose, trying to find the meaning of May Fourth for modern China. From the perspective of historical attributes, both books can be seen as the substantial advancement of the study of the new cultural movement over the years, which is different from the single teleological narrative of the past, highlighting the pluralism and tension within the new culture. Its Chinese, sound, and local development are all hot topics of concern in the new cultural history, and there is an interesting match with the theme of the new cultural movement. In China's modern history, the New Culture Movement has taken on both historical and mythological significance. From a historical point of view, many scholars worry that the new cultural history will cause the danger of fragmentation of historical research, but this risk is more often caused by the deliberate pursuit of the research orientation of many scholars to marginalized topics, and for the "major" historical topic of the new cultural movement, it just makes up for the shortcomings of the over-neatness of previous research, and through the addition of free historical details, the grand issues take on a richer color. From a mythological point of view, the New Culture Movement put forward the slogan of value revaluation, with the orientation of value first. The integral deconstruction of the New Culture Movement does not mean that the mythological or sacred nature of the New Culture Movement is denied. If modern China needs a psychological origin, the New Culture Movement deserves it. The approach of new cultural history opposes the shrouded historiographical narrative, and through fragmentation strategies, the mind is re-liberated from the historical narrative, allowing us to see that the two sides of history and mythology have convection in addition to opposites. Mythological attributes differ from religion in that we can criticize it. In addition to what Mr. Chen Yinke called "sympathy for understanding," we also need to put forward "critical understanding." Only by combining the two can we see the historical and mythological sides of the new cultural movement. Therefore, the new cultural history not only blindly deconstructs myths, but also allows us to re-examine the mythology of historical events, so that the new cultural movement can glow with new academic productivity.
Meng Qingshu made a speech entitled "Where to Place New Culture?" report. He pointed out that the two books focused on by the workshop have distinct styles and characteristics, representing the actual achievements of a new generation of researchers of new cultural movements. Ji Jianqing's work is sharp and simple, facing the core problems of the ChongXin Cultural Movement, approaching the study of classical intellectual history in terms of methodology, and is more speculative and dialogue-oriented. Yuan Yidan's work is flexible and ethereal, and he is good at excavating fulcrums between the gaps in the historical materials, so as to pry the whole and deconstruct the myth, which seems to be a sword that goes sideways, but in fact has the effect of sealing the throat with a sword. She has a strong narrative ability and is not satisfied with telling a good story, in fact, through specific and micro events/personal research, the research on the new cultural movement in the methodological sense of cleanup and restart, is to deal with the multidisciplinary perspective of cultural history, social history, intellectual history and literary history overlapping barriers, it can be seen that the research of the two young scholars and the academic trend of the past twenty years have a close relationship, they are committed to disenchantment of the new cultural movement, so that the new cultural movement research got rid of the narrative of historical teleology, Unlocked from the various discourse frameworks inherent in it, openness is regained. Of course, this unlocking also brings with it the anxiety of losing the sense of center of gravity and position. On the one hand, whether and how new overarching perspectives are needed and how new overarching perspectives are studied becomes an urgent question. Ji Jianqing was wary and corrective of post-structuralist historiography, and tried to re-anchor the new cultural movement from the socialist revolution as a consequence of the new cultural movement; Yuan Yidan reminded that the specific study can be microscopic, but its purpose is to pick up fragments from the historical scene and put together a new picture, which should lead to a kind of "historical synthesis" from the inside out. On the other hand, researchers also need to establish new coordinate systems to house themselves. From the perspective of the division of disciplines, modern literary research is becoming more and more "historiographical", and the time difference effect in theory and method has led to the formation of a certain inter-disciplinary hierarchy, and researchers have lost the advantages and characteristics of literary research to a certain extent while striving to open up literature and history and integrate disciplines. If we can't determine where we came from and where we are, if we can't know who I am, it will be difficult to position ourselves and make a truly in-depth and holistic grasp of history.
Ji Jianqing gave a report entitled "Rethinking the Relationship between New Culture and Tradition:Starting from Dewey's Visit to China." He pointed out that during the May Fourth period, "culture" was a relatively broad and general concept compared with thought and literature, with strong inclusiveness and diffusion, and had a certain natural affinity with the dynamic and expanding concept of "movement"; on the other hand, thought and literature were certain intellectual activities, while "culture" had a certain practicality in the context of that time, and the practical cultural movement collided with the specific context of social life, generating new practices in the interaction between concepts and society. This allows for some new thinking on the relationship between new cultures and traditions. Dewey's visit to China is a good example. Dewey wrote a large number of articles about China during his visit to China, first of all, in his view, the New Culture Movement was a movement premised on ideological and moral change, and the advocates of the New Culture Movement emphasized the priority of ideological and moral issues, but instead approached the Confucian concept. Second, Dewey has a deep sympathy and understanding of the long Chinese cultural tradition expressed in social life and customs, and he believes that Chinese have a democratic spirit, value local autonomy, and regard it as a very important driving force for China's modernization. Third, Dewey compared the modernization of China and Japan. He is critical of Japan's model of modernization, which has fully imported Western resources but preserved more Confucian authority, compared to Chinese more open in thought; Japan's modernization has been carried out from top to bottom with the help of the power of the state, while China's new cultural movement relies more on the self-organization of the people and is more endogenous. Both Takeuchi and Lin Yusheng were influenced by Dewey, but their value judgments were diametrically opposed: Takeuchi discussed the path of modernization in China and Japan from the perspective of reflecting on Japan's defeat in the war, affirming the endogenous nature of Chinese modernity embodied in the New Culture Movement; Lin Yusheng criticized the Confucian mode of thought that has continued to influence since May Fourth, "the way to solve problems through ideology and culture", which has been influential since May Fourth. Today, it seems that the overall judgment of the two scholars is problematic, but we cannot but admit that they have each created a "historical synthesis" narrative of the May Fourth New Culture from their own awareness of the problem and their concern. There are many traditions in China at present, and the new culture itself has become a tradition, but it may be on the margins of it. How to obtain one's own vision and perspective in this realistic context, and thus make a new historical synthesis, needs to seek a new foothold in the constantly changing land.
Yuan Yidan's report is entitled "The Structure and Remnants of a New Culture." From both positive and negative aspects, she expounded on how and why historical synthesis is possible and why it is impossible on the issue of the May Fourth New Culture. Historical synthesis is impossible, and there are mainly difficulties in both value and technology. At present, it is difficult to write a general history of May Fourth that surpasses Zhou Cezhong, and the fundamental reason is that it is difficult to fulfill the promise of "value revaluation". The suspense of value revaluation is due to the high uncertainty of the present and the future on the one hand, and on the other hand, it is also related to the subject state of the researcher. Only when touching major historical issues such as May Fourth can researchers deeply experience a certain sense of powerlessness. The May Fourth movement itself was the product of a political crisis and an ideological crisis. Every re-elaboration of the "May Fourth" is tantamount to a reconfirmation of a moment of crisis. If researchers do not feel the sense of crisis that may fourth is pregnant with from the current real situation, or feel that the medicine is not right; just treating "May Fourth" as a conventional historical topic and treating it technically means that "May Fourth" is exhausted as a kind of ideological potential energy. On the old topic of "May Fourth", the historical novelty of new materials, new methods, and new paradigms is always temporary and partial; the real sense of crisis is the source of renewing historical interpretation. How historical synthesis is possible, this big question is embodied in The New Cultural Movement that rises into a structural anxiety. The concept of "surplus" is driven out by structural anxiety. She is more concerned with the remnants of the structure than with the neat structure, and more concerned with the cracks and folds of the structure than with the smooth appearance of history. When asked how historical synthesis is possible, there is still an impulse to rewrite the overall history. While general history aims to paint a portrait of an era, Foucault proposes another way of presenting a historical structure, which he calls "general history." General history focuses on the discontinuities of history, including the limits of processes, the inflection points of curves, the inversion of motion, and so on. The face of the book "The Rise" is closer to focusing on the general history of diffuse and discontinuity.
Professor Chen Pingyuan made a speech
After the end of the third unit, Ji Jianqing presided over the roundtable discussion, and first invited Professor Chen Pingyuan, who came to the venue, to speak. Chen Pingyuan sorted out his writings and speeches on the May Fourth New Culture Movement in the past few years. In 2019, he tried to continue the book Touching History: May Fourth Figures and Modern China, when the idea was to include opponents of the New Culture Movement (such as Zhang Houzai and Feng Shengsan), not just the students who participated in the May Fourth Movement at that time. Chen Pingyuan mentioned that Zhang Jingsheng, who had returned from France at that time, had introduced Rousseau to the people of the time, but it ended in failure, which showed that the New Culture Movement had a ceiling. "May Fourth" does not mean new culture, but new culture will move toward "May Fourth". To do academic research, if the object is a new cultural movement, we should try to talk about it as much as possible, and if the object is the May Fourth Movement, we should talk about it later. Professor Wagner's latest research on the May Fourth Movement, which focuses on the May Fourth Movement in the history of diplomacy, emphasizes the need to understand the role of foreigners in China in May Fourth, but unfortunately he died before he finished this work, but his thinking is available for our reference. Chen Pingyuan also mentioned that he once wrote a short article entitled "My "May Fourth Centenary"," which expressed four worries about the centenary of may fourth: The first is that young people cannot understand the expression of the "May Fourth" intellectuals, that people in those years were hungry at a time of crisis, that they may have misunderstood Western things, and that they could not withstand today's use of academic and professional perspectives to beat them, but they played a historical role; the second was that they were afraid that commemorative activities would become empty rituals; and the third was that they were afraid that academic research was only increasing historical facts The fourth fear is that the May Fourth study will become a scholarly study, and there is no way to enter the real topic and intervene in contemporary life. Chen Pingyuan hoped that Chinese would continue to talk to the May Fourth like the French and the French Revolution. The study of the New Culture Movement is a kind of historical study, while the study of the May Fourth Movement is not entirely a historical study, and the "May Fourth" is also an ideological resource in a sense, which is related to both learning and our real life. The researchers' dialogue with the "May Fourth" is not entirely for the sake of learning, but also for the sake of the spirit of our generation.
Scholars have also expressed their opinions on the anxiety of disciplinary divisions and the relationship between academic research and reality. Meng Qingshu believes that modern literary research has absorbed many research tools from other disciplines, but it is difficult for modern literary studies to provide research paradigms to other disciplines. Scholars of modern literature often read literature from other disciplines, while scholars from other disciplines rarely read the research results of modern literature, which is a profound crisis in the discipline. Zhang Lihua believes that unlike the anxiety between literature and history, we can also see the interconnection between literature and history. The relationship between the researcher and the past can be analogous to the relationship between the critic and the scholar, and the method of literary criticism can be applied to historical research. If we look at the flow of the critic's approach to text, the unclear boundaries of modern literature are not a good thing, precisely because modernity is not complete, and it is precisely because every study can provide a perspective for the present. The uncertainty of our times has increased, and it is difficult to find a fulcrum that everyone agrees on to go back to history, but a common fulcrum is also unnecessary.
Chen Pingyuan finally pointed out that the division of disciplines is not so important, and the researchers themselves are important. Scholars are fully capable of choosing their own topics and methods, and do not have to worry about the topic of literature and history division. Each generation of scholars has its own anxieties, and in order to cope with the pressure of the current academic system, Chen Pingyuan suggested that young scholars can write small articles in addition to one or two large articles a year to maintain the warmth of temperament and the sense of literature.
(This article has been reviewed by the presenters)