Editor's Note
Creation and criticism, such as the wings of a bird, the axle of a car. The development of literary creation is inseparable from the prosperity of literary criticism and the efforts of generations of literary critics. In 1998, the Southern Literary Circle launched the "Critics Today" column, which has introduced more than 100 critics so far. Critics of different personalities speak "my view of criticism" with their sharpness, talent, and agility, and hundreds of articles have accumulated to form a sensitive, vivid, and full of vitality and talent.
Now the China Writers Network has re-launched these articles to share with you, so stay tuned.
1
Critics of the day
Xia Lie (Filmed in 2013)
Xia Lie is a professor at the School of Culture, Creativity and Media of Hangzhou Normal University, and a doctoral supervisor. First-class writer. Leading talent of humanities and social sciences of "Ten Thousand Talents Plan" in Zhejiang Province, specially invited researcher of the Museum of Modern Chinese Literature. He is also the vice president of the Network Literature Research Institute of the China Writers Association, the executive vice chairman of the Zhejiang Provincial Network Writers Association, and the chairman of the Hangzhou Literary and Art Critics Association. There are more than a dozen monographs, review collections "Concept Reconstruction and Imagination Reconstruction", and works such as "Great Gods: Ten Years of Me and Internet Writers". He has won the 2014 Young Critic Award, the 3rd "Woodpecker Cup" Chinese Literary and Art Criticism Annual Excellent Work, Zhejiang Literary and Art Criticism Award, etc.
My view of criticism
Self-justification – my view of criticism
Xia Lie
For a while as a teenager I wanted to be a monk, certainly not a literary critic.
At that time, I read all kinds of miscellaneous books, had an intrinsic understanding of the spirit of Confucianism and Taoism, and did not know the beauty of contemporary literary works, and then I graduated from high school, found a unit to work, and in less than half a year, I suddenly understood Lu Xun's world as if I was empowered--there was ecstasy in my heart for these realizations, and they became my spiritual energy with sentimentality. Some time ago, I saw a video of CCTV Chai Jing on Weibo, she said that "people who have not cried in the middle of the night are not enough to talk about life", which brought me back to the years of the skinny and bony late youth of refugees, and my small body at that time in order to carry Shakyamuni, Confucius, Lao Zhuang, Wang Yangming and Lu Xun, it was inevitable that I would often cry in the middle of the night, making it like a wolf. That was around 1993.
Later, when I went to the graduate class of the department of Chinese of Hangzhou University, I studied under Professor Wu Xiuming, and I had the opportunity to systematize my literary knowledge, especially how to write papers, and I clearly remember that Teacher Wu taught me to understand "logical excess" and "theoretical improvement", and guided me to slowly become familiar with the methods of the academic school. Unfortunately, I have been doing a good job in this regard, and in the end the teacher also knew that I could not force myself, and in order to give me confidence, he said, "You are a person with Reiki." If Teacher Wu taught me how to write an essay long, then another teacher, Li Qingxi, taught me how to write an essay short. Shortly after I graduated, I arrived at the Zhejiang Literature and Art Publishing House, and I could tell almost exactly how many important works published by this publishing house in the 1980s and early 1990s (including the search for Qian Liqun, Chen Pingyuan, Wang Xiaoming, Cai Xiang, Wu Liang, Cheng Depei, Xu Zidong, Huang Ziping, Li Jie, Nan Fan, Zhao Yuan, Liu Na, and others who commented on the "New Humanities" series), and I remember exactly who the editors of some of the books were, so let alone Li Qingxi's "Searching for Roots Literature". New Notes novels as well as modern literature and literary theory credit and editorial curation skills. He instructed me to write short articles that newspapers and periodicals can use - book reviews or book words, thinking that many people can only use high-headed sermons to support the paper in fact only needs an essay and a study to complete (this is the same as Chen Sihe's opinion that monographs are inferior to papers and papers are not as good as academic essays) at that time), so I longed for this style of criticism, and preferred to do "dried tofu" in newspapers - who knows that today's newspaper supplements and university evaluation systems are so far away from themselves to catch up, and newspaper supplements are so close to the writers and booksellers publishing houses, it is difficult for people to catch up. In addition, a teacher who is not in the contemporary literary world also has an influence on me, he does foreign literature, likes to read various Western aphorisms or tell us about his own experience, he told me, "Learning should grasp two ends, the oldest and the most immediate", he said very correctly, but the result is that I have two loose ends, and now that the Qingming Winter Solstice thinks of him, I feel embarrassed to say anything to the old people in the other world. These were around 1999.
Personally, I have the greatest respect for what Thibodé calls "the criticism of the masters", which he says mainly by writers and writers, and I think that it is the insider who speaks the jargon and interprets the heart with the heart— the core of literature is "heart", and the heartless is dead. As for the professional criticism (academic) of Thibaud's teaching, I am in awe, and the spontaneous criticism (media and salons) I find it very interesting and ecologically unbiased.
Personally, I attach great importance to interesting criticisms, feel that they are beneficial to more people's lives, and make critics a person who gives himself to literature. For example, Li Qingxi, Wu Liang, Li Jingze and several others, I think they all pay attention to words, think of novelty, love works and love themselves. I've been reading their criticisms. Cheng Depei once said at the banquet, "Xia Lie's comment is a bit respectful. Lee Kyung-taek writes comments such as playing on the field, playing well but not scoring goals. You are sometimes in and sometimes not in." I know from now on that I have been watching for a long time and finally have "fun" to come out! In contrast, I am not a critical personality person, and writing reviews is more content with "seeking beauty" than "seeking truth".
In recent years, I have done a lot of literary activities and publishing planning in Hangzhou, and I insist that this is the duty of a critic and an important way to intervene in the cultural life of the public (citizens and students), and I think that critics are organic and need to actively participate in the construction of the life of the times. It was also in the past few years that I began to talk about genre literature, and when I paid attention to them, they were still so-called "garbage", but I obeyed the words of Mr. Jin Kemu's "Saying "Edge"": "Nowadays, people like to talk about the center, not to talk about the side, in fact, there are articles to do on the side." Without edges, where is the center? The center is measured from the edges. "I mean, literary criticism, either starting with the construction of practice, or starting from the margins, can be positive energy." Both the eighties and the May Fourth did it.
2012 is coming to an end, and I can't be a monk anymore. If asked what I want to do? Maybe not yet a literary critic, or write a novel?
The article was published in Southern Literature Journal, No. 1, 2013
Critic Impressions
Those once young faces and simultaneous voices
- Reasons to recommend Xia Lie
Wang Gan
This topic, some emotion, some sadness, but also some envy. Obviously, it was the tone of the people who came over. People who come over are not necessarily old qualifications, not necessarily successful people, but only experiencers. Those who come over are participants, witnesses, and often looking back.
Looking back is not a way of life, looking back is just a state of mind. Looking back is a feature of age and psychological aging. For example, when I talk about Xia Lie now, I think of those once young faces, Chen Sihe, Wang Xiaoming, Huang Ziping, Wu Liang, Li Qingxi, Cheng Depei, Xu Zidong, Nanfan, Li Jie, Ding Fan, Li Jiefei, Zhang Ling, Pan Kaixiong, He Shaojun and other friends, these former "young critics" are now gradually becoming middle-aged, leading, and de-critical, and their achievements are still the same, but the traces of the years are still difficult to calm down.
Now that I think about it, "young critic" is a strange term, a special product of the 1980s, and it seems that it has never been so loud before and after. In the 1980s, "young critics" seemed to be an identity and an organization, but on closer inspection, they were nothing but a concept created to distinguish between age differences, or to distinguish the titles of two generations of critics. Why is there such a name? Only in the context of the 80s can its special meaning be felt. Just like years later, people will wonder if there is such a name as online literature today, and there is a difference between literature written on kraft paper and carved on stone tablets? Is there a difference between reading and writing online and on paper? However, today we will emphasize the concept of online literature.
Young critics are naturally a concept that has disappeared, especially in today's increasingly professorial and doctoral guidance of literary and art theory and literary criticism, young critics are easily confused with graduate students. And the comments of those young people on the Internet are easy to be silked. More importantly, young critics failed to become the living group of the 80s, lacking the overall literary power and effectiveness, and their voices were often drowned out in the voices of the previous generation.
In such a situation, I met Xia Lie, I knew him as if he was in the seminar of the post-80s female writers group in Huzhou, his youth and speech and private speech made me feel fresh, his voice seemed not to be spoken by our generation, and then met in seminars such as online literature, and he seemed to have been the head of the literary original department of an internet company for a few days. Later, I read some of his articles and found that his articles had a familiar breath of young critics, which came from the familiar 80s: warm, sensitive, lyrical, idealistic.
Enthusiasm is the emotional symbol of literature in the 80s, in an era of waste, literature as a special weapon of a generation, with high enthusiasm to criticize and call is a must of that era, but also the driving force of literary criticism. Xia Lie rarely inherited such a spirit of literary criticism, because after the market economy bubble of the 90s, the enthusiasm of literature and the enthusiasm of criticism seemed to be replaced by practical market effects and stereotyped textbook procedures, and literary criticism, especially contemporary literary criticism, needed enthusiasm and even passion, because the non-classic and fluidity of contemporary literature made people unable to make after-the-fact remarks with a static vision and a calm attitude, but to "breathe and share a common destiny" with writers, so that they could be immersed in it. in order to make a simultaneous sound. Xia Lie is one of the few critics who can make a simultaneous voice of the present, and like his name, he maintains the same enthusiasm as summer for the literature of the moment, and his discovery and interpretation of the emerging literary style is so timely and so full of emotion. This enthusiasm is not only expressed in the admiration and praise of his contemporaries, but also extended to the cheering of the works of the previous generation, for example, in his book "Fission and Interaction", there are both descriptions and analysis of new art styles such as the Internet, genres, and animations, as well as the interpretation of the new works of Mo Yan, Su Tong, Yuan Min and others, as well as the summary of the "love powerlessness" of best-selling texts such as "The Love of hawthorn trees", you will find that Xia Lie is trying to embrace the landscape and water of current literature with his not particularly broad mind.
Sensitivity is also the basic character of literary criticism in the 80s, capturing new literary phenomena in a timely manner, capturing new literary dynamics in a timely manner, and discovering new literary talents in a timely manner, thus promoting the progress and development of the entire literature. The young critics of the last era were so sharp that writers felt led, or carried, rather than carried. They are often the discoverers of new ideas, the propagators of new ideas, or the promoters of new ideas. Xia Lie seems to have such an endowment by nature, he is keenly aware that some kind of fission is taking place in contemporary literature, and he questions the key words we have used for more than twenty years through the interpretation of the word "transformation", and this question comes first from a sensitivity, "If the use of the word transformation and the use of the word rupture may indicate the difference between the following two meanings: first, the former is more from the socio-political point of view, the latter is more from the perspective of cultural construction; second, the difference in emotional meaning, that is, the transformation is moderate, harmonious, Optimistic, systemic, fracture is hard, worried, pessimistic, conservative – then, I agree that I am in the perspective of cultural construction, the focus, but prefer to choose 'rupture' as the intention and emotional expression. In other words, social transformation prides itself on kidnapping culture, sacrificing the vitality of culture, that is, the sense of dependence, experience, cognition and memory of culture in the body and mind of the people, which I think is a very bad, failed, and even immoral thing. Then I began to oppose the simple dependence of culture on society and politics, and to emphasize the independence, transcendence and responsibility of culture." The deconstruction of transformation is powerful, although not very sharp, but the skepticism itself reflects a keen grasp of the current culture out of a fission state.
Lyricism for academic criticism, perhaps lack of objectivity and prudence, but in the 80s, almost all young critics have a lyric poet-like temperament, Wu Liang, Xu Zidong's articles sometimes have lyrical paragraphs, and even the articles of Peking University scholar Huang Ziping also use descriptive titles such as "The Spirit of the Contemplative Old Tree". Strictly speaking, the "spirit of the contemplative old tree" even carries a certain lyricism, and for the 80s, the lack of lyrical function of literary criticism was inconceivable. Lyricism comes largely from the descriptiveness of the object of commentary, and the description itself is that the thing itself is in a state of change and instability, and the criticism has the meaning of presentation and reproduction. Xia Lie's comments have a strong presentation, although he has enough analysis of the phenomenon of criticism and writers, but not like some people like to do a categorical pronouncement, he is always between the blade of criticism and the gentleness of embroidery, he explains this state in the terms of the IT industry, called "interaction", "interaction" itself is dialogue, is to find compatibility, and this practice of transferring the terminology of other industries to the field of literary criticism itself is a lyrical discourse of the electronic age.
Of course, the lyrical style of literary criticism in the 80s is also related to the idealistic sentiments of the 80s, which is a key to reading the 80s. Today's increasingly trivial realistic novels are also a gentle identification and irony of the current reality, and when you read the passionate and dream-filled commentaries of the 80s, you will understand why Zhang Chengzhi will not write in an ironic tone and even express great indignation at the writers who write ironically. The positivist wind that emerged in the literary theory after the 90s is actually a farewell and burial of this passion and dream, but literature has the function of igniting ideals, literary criticism is not the response to reality, ideals are not sins, and madness and irrationality are the basis of harm. Among the critics of his contemporaries, Xia Lie was a more specific multi-habitat person involved in the process of literary creation and literary production, he was the editor of literary publications, he was a critic of the Writers' Association, he was the literary director of the network company, he edited books, and he also planned genre literary competitions, almost all the literary production front line can see his figure, he is optimistic that online literature will make literature undergo great fission, and he devotes himself wholeheartedly to literary activities and literary criticism. This view of literature with the theory of evolution was extremely popular in the 1980s, eager for a new trend, believing that the later trends of thought would far exceed the previous trends, believing that the vanguard must replace tradition, believing that tomorrow must be better than today, and that youth must be better than old age. Evolutionists of this literature are often idealists. The great Lu Xun of that year also believed in evolution, because pessimists lost confidence in the future and the future. Therefore, when I saw Xia Lie's busy figure on the front line of literature, I was in a trance and turned back in time, and the young critics of that year were full of ideals and busy and energetic about literature.
About two years ago, Zhang Yanling asked me to recommend the review of the new sharp, and I suddenly thought of Xia Lie. Two years later, Xia Lie also grew two years older, and I completely entered the ranks of middle age, so the text has a lot of feelings, according to the original intention of the "Southern Literary Circle", to recommend Xia Lie, a new sharp, but my text looks back too much, there is little evaluation of Xia Lie's academic value, I believe that Xia Lie's academic achievements should be far above my comments, and I also believe that Xia Lie's advantages will not decrease with age, because time will slowly blunt the new sharp, which will make young people non-young. How long does Xia Lie's simultaneous vocal energy accompany current literature?
(Wang Gan, who worked for The Selected Novels magazine)
Read more
Impressions of a Critic
Zhang Yanling, Zhang Ping, editor-in-chief
Writers And Publishers September 2019
My View of Criticism
Guangxi Normal University Press, January 2016
Editor: Deng Jiefeng
Second instance: Liu Ya
Third trial: Chen Tao, Wang Yang