On March 5, Professor Jin Li of the Department of Chinese of Fudan University brought his three students, Yang Zhaofeng, a 2018 master's student of the Department of Chinese of Fudan University and a chinese teacher at the Baoshan Campus of the Second Affiliated Middle School of China Normal University, Jiang Linwan, a 2017 master's student and game screenwriter of the Department of Chinese of Fudan University, and Cao Yujie, a 2021 master's student of the Department of Chinese of Fudan University, as a guest of Sinan Reading Club.
They are all members of the Fudan University "Wangdao" discussion group. The discussion activities are organized by Jin Li once a month, and the location is set at Room 2719 of the Guanghua West Main Building, and the participating students are all "post-90s" or "post-00s". The most special thing is that the objects of their discussion are all newcomers and new works in the current literary frontier scene, such as Jia Xingjia, Shuang Xuetao, Di An, Hu Qian, Chen Zhiwei, Chen Chuncheng...
"Regarding the 'appearance' of literary youth, the critic Li Jingze once made a very vivid analogy: the first thing a literary youth had to do when he appeared in the 1980s was to grab the microphone, which meant occupying important literary resources. But today's era is different, young people see that you are Mai Ba, then this microphone you hold, I don't want it, and then they run to the other side of the world to sing and dance. Jin Li said that although the discussion group "does not count credits for students and no work points for teachers", they hope to see the broader world of literature and enjoy more vibrant songs and dances together in the discussion.
From the campus to Sinan, the teachers and students of the "Wangdao" discussion group launched a wonderful dialogue on "The Present and Future of Youth Literature". Under the auspices of Yu Xueji, editor of Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House, the "Four Masters and Apprentices" talked about the current situation of contemporary youth literary writing, the influence of game film and television on literature, and a literary tradition that focuses on contemporaries.
Sinan Book Club No. 386. From left to right: Yu Xueji, Jiang Linwan, Jin Li, Yang Zhaofeng, Cao Yujie. The Paper's reporter Luo Xin photographed
Build a bridge between two sounds
Jin Li always remembers that more than a decade ago, on the second floor of the Sinan Literature House, Shanghai Culture organized a seminar. There were two groups of people attending the seminar, one was a group of writers who entered the literary world in the 1980s and are now the most popular writers in contemporary China, such as Su Tong, Ge Fei, and Sun Ganlu, and the other group of young critics such as Jin Li, Huang Dehai, and Zhang Dinghao, and the two groups sat together for dialogue.
"At that time, there was a senior who spoke, and began to criticize Guo Jingming and Han Han, as well as their fans, and at this moment, I heard a very small voice behind me say, 'Who said it?'" I looked back and saw that a girl should be a 'post-90s'. Her voice was very faint, but it clearly expressed disapproval of the statement of this predecessor. And I, sitting between these two voices. ”
This picture will always inadvertently break into JinLi's mind, and at the same time, it is accompanied by a feeling of shame. "As a follower and researcher of contemporary literature, I should have become a bridge between these two aspects, but at that time, I did not tell my predecessors through my own research why the literature that was so unpopular in their eyes could touch the heartstrings of today's young people, nor did I tell young readers that there were many excellent writers besides Guo Jingming and Han Han. This should have been a very important task for researchers of contemporary Chinese literature, but both were far from enough. So I thought that we should build a bridge for these two voices to communicate with each other. ”
The "Wangdao" discussion group is such a bridge. Jin Li said that the group specifically tracked the new works of newcomers, and deliberately avoided Mo Yan, Yu Hua, Wang Anyi and other writers who had completed classicization and could be calibrated by the coordinate system of literary history.
On the other hand, when Teacher Wang Anyi first debuted, there were many of her peers who were paying attention to him, and my mentor Chen Sihe had a dialogue with Teacher Wang Anyi, titled: "Dialogue between Two 69th Junior High School Students." This was the dialogue between the two literary youths in the literary scene at that time, and it was also the starting point of their growth. Later, when each representative work of Teacher Wang Anyi was published, Chen Si and the teacher responded, which is a very benign relationship. In Jin's view, the mutual understanding and support between contemporaries and critics is particularly moving, "This tradition should continue in our generation, which is why our discussion group targeted young writers." ”
Recently, the "Wangdao" discussion group class transcript "I Used to Be With the World: 2719 Literary Dialogue" was published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House.
Who can represent the most talented writers of this generation
In 2017, the "Wangdao" discussion group focused on the works of a group of young writers, mainly based on the youth creation special numbers and "post-90s" novel albums launched by major pure literary journals. The students were very excited at first, but when they finished reading these works, the general reaction was disappointment, and even some students said: they definitely cannot represent the creation of the most talented writers of our generation.
Jin Li was very surprised. "In my opinion, this may already be the most representative literary journal in China, why do they still feel that it is not good enough?" Jin Li asked them again, for the same generation of writers, who are they reading? So he heard a lot of unfamiliar names from the students, such as Chen Zhiwei and Datou Ma.
"At that moment, I felt that it was actually the students who were promoting me, and although I was also paying attention to contemporary Chinese literature and young writers, the map I was facing was actually very old, my vision was too narrow, and the more active, more creative, more original young writers were not in my field of vision." Jin Li sighed that it was his students who reminded him to expand his reading horizons and adjust his observations.
"Wangdao" discussion group discussion site
On the other hand, the students also found such a discussion interesting. Yang Zhaofeng was most impressed by the fact that everyone once discussed Wang Suxin's "White Night Photo Studio", "I remember that day, at the beginning we discussed it with an appreciative attitude, and then everyone began to pick faults, because all the students who entered the Chinese Department also wanted to write their own, and it was inevitable that they would first put on the mask of a critic to discuss, but when they discussed, they 'changed their faces' and began to speak freely. After twenty minutes, Teacher Jin Li began to summarize, he said, let's listen to the author's own opinion, it turned out that Wang Suxin was hiding in the seat behind us that day, listening to our discussion of her work. It's a dramatic field. ”
"Not every discussion is 'perfect.'" Cao Yujie, the youngest guest of the book club and born in 1999, said that once everyone discussed Xu Haofeng's novella "Poetry Eyes Tired of Heaven", at first they felt very charming after reading it, but after entering this text for more than half an hour from the perspective of literature, drama, film and television adaptation, the eight or nine people at the round table did not know what to talk about.
"After I went back that time, I thought a lot, when a new literary text was presented to us, as a literary reader or even a scholar of literature, we actually had no way to enter it with a more appropriate perspective, and that feeling was mixed."
But in such a different kind of discussion and reflection, young people who love literature are moving forward. "We had a classmate who was one of the authors of the book, who went to the University of California, Berkeley, after graduating from college, and she sent back a photograph of the English version of Seventeen-Year-Old Hussars that she had photographed in her local bookstore. At that time, I was very moved, and I felt that as my classmates spread their branches and leaves to the world, the seeds of youth literature were also brought to all parts of the world. ”
Why contemporary youth literature is not satisfactory enough
At the event, several young students also talked about their overall impressions of contemporary young writers, that is, contemporary writers. Yang Zhaofeng bluntly said that he was still not very satisfied. "For example, if you give me two novels by young writers, one from 2020 and one from 2000, let me take it like a week, and I will definitely get it for 2000, because I will feel in my heart that the language and content of the 2020 novel will not necessarily make me more satisfied."
In fact, Yang Zhaofeng is also reflecting on why he has such an "impression" a lot of times. "I think there's a situation in the novels right now, where the interest and irony are constantly declining, but the lyricism they're trying to build is rising. Often a story is full of aesthetic memories or a desire for another beautiful world, full of lyrical desires and impulses, but its observation and reflection on real life is slowly declining, which is where I feel a little dissatisfied in my heart. ”
He also mentioned that there will also be some very mature young authors who can achieve a balance of lyricism and irony, such as Zhou Jianning's recent work "Tomorrow's Party", although it still has the flavor of Chinese and Japanese youth novels at the beginning of the century, but it has done a good job. "And some of the works we discussed in the group, such as Zheng Xiaodonkey's "Going to the Cave Court" and Chen Chuncheng's "Submarine at Night", whether it is stagnant or light to read, I feel that the proportion of humor and irony in the novel is relatively low, and the novel is full of emotions. This form of lyricism is based on the repression of a certain era and an escape from real life, but this way of cracking repression is very passive, like catharsis rather than playfulness. ”
"As a literature lover, the young writers I look forward to are writers in the middle of two paths." In Jiang Linwan's view, it is easy for young people to go to two completely different paths, one is more academic, and the other is to put into the market, the market will give timely feedback to the author, including writing on the Internet, the reader's comments will affect the fate of each character and the direction of the ending, and they will also have departments to collect online feedback when they do games. "But what we actually need is a creator in the middle of two paths."
The "Young Writers entering the Classroom" hosted by Jin Li invited Wang Zhanhei to communicate with Fudan students
The interaction between literature and public life
Yang Zhaofeng and Jiang Linwan have both graduated from Fudan, and their current job trajectories are exactly the opposite: Yang Zhaofeng came out of the game company to become a teacher, and Jiang Linwan came out of middle school to become a game screenwriter.
In Jiang Linwan's observation, some excellent games are pursuing the introduction of literary elements. She was playing a game called Bliss Disco, and the first time she played it, she was surprised, with large passages of dialogue and discussions of things she had found less popular in the game. "We tend to think of the game as a very light piece of entertainment, and generally players will seek very timely sensory stimulation, but that game discusses capitalism, discusses various political points, and it's also very popular. This game shows some of the possibilities of discovering literature in the game, and its style and art style together constitute the complete world of this game. ”
"Personally, I often play script killing, because I have a good friend who is a film and television screenwriter, and she will take me to play. Film and television screenwriters playing script killing will also be fed back in their works, which may lead to the style of script killing in the film and television dramas we see now. "Yang Zhaofeng for example, for example, Taiwanese writer Chen Xue wrote the original text of "Skyscraper", the structure of writing and the form of script killing are very different, but when this work is presented as a 12-episode network drama, we can see that there is a very classic script killing structure; for example, this year's hit "Beginning", there are also very obvious script killing attributes, each episode is presented as a character biography attached to the main narrative, and each character biography will be arranged according to the progress of the plot advancement." It will not dismantle truth and human nature like "In the Bamboo Forest", but in order to lower the threshold of understanding, it deliberately eliminates literature and reduces this form to a tool that serves the plot. ”
In Yang Zhaofeng's view, this kind of work is full of humanistic care on the surface, and it seems very flattering in commercial writing, and the ideal audience is not those readers who have been trained by many literary classics, and it is easy to applaud and applaud. When readers who are eager to get the pleasure of reading are disciplined by this kind of script-killing thinking, authors who are eager to be recognized are disciplined by this model, and literary platforms or carriers that need to complete KPIs are disciplined by this wind direction, it will lead us to see a lot of similar writing structures on the market.
"I personally can't say whether this tendency has a positive or negative impact, but we can see that it has already had an impact." Both Mr. Jin and I personally pay more attention to the interaction between literature and public life, and we find it difficult to ignore this change in wind direction. ”
Deeply concerned with the writing of the youth of the same generation
For the observation of the brother and sister, Cao Yujie was also very emotional. He remembered that when he entered the Fudan Chinese Department, it was exactly one hundred years since the establishment of the Chinese Department. At the summit forum of the dialogue between the five department heads, Chen Sihe once again said this passage to the students: "When I studied modern literature, modern literature is a river, and I am a stone in this river. Not only me, but all those who study modern literature and engage in modern literature are stones in this river. So are you. This river carries the life information of its predecessors, flows from us, and when it flows past, it drowns us. But when the river flows through our bodies, it brings with it the information of our lives. Then this literary history is a living literary history, a living literary history. ”
"My mentor is Teacher Jin Li, Teacher Jin's mentor is Teacher Chen Sihe, Chen Sihe's mentor is Mr. Jia Zhifang, Mr. Jia Zhifang once studied under Lu Xun, and when we trace it back according to this lineage, we can 'boast' that we are all disciples and grandsons of Lu Xun." Cao Yujie said that behind this seemingly joking tone, there is actually a very personal sense of mission inheritance, "If you go back, generations of teachers have paid deep attention to the young people of the era in which they lived, the various aesthetic styles and various ideological concepts they displayed, and how such aesthetic styles and ideological concepts were deeply embedded in the social environment of that era." ”
Recently, the "Wangdao" discussion group class transcript "I Used to Be with the World: 2719 Literary Dialogue" was also published by Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House. The two parts of the book, "Round Table" and "Pen Talk", are the actual records of the discussion group class, and the further thinking and independent writing of some students on a topic constitute the "homework book" part.