History, form and cultural politics
——The "contemporary" structure of contemporary literary studies
Text | Zhu Yu
I. Historical Homogeneous Temporal Critique and Reinterpretation of the Concept of "Contemporary Literature"
When we are ready to begin to deal with any "contemporary literary" object, the slightly reflective person experiences a difficulty. Unlike expressions such as "ancient" and "modern", which rely on relatively clear historical periodization, the semantic ambiguity carried by the term "contemporary" may be one of the root causes of difficulties. In the mid-1980s, Tang Tao proposed that "contemporary literature should not write history", which for the first time pointed out this ambiguity, and also revealed the impulse to separate the "new period" from the previous historical stage:
“
The West does have Contemporary Literature, but this "contemporary" implies "current", referring to the literature that is currently underway, which is different from what we call contemporary literature. Our contemporary literature has covered more than thirty years of history since the founding of the People's Republic. Is it true that the literature of thirty years ago is still the literature of the present, and the literature that is still in progress in the fifties and the eighties? It is more appropriate to classify these into modern literature. ...... History needs stability. ...... The History of Contemporary Literature should be replaced by a Review of Contemporary Literature. [1]
The literal meaning of Tang Taoyan clearly presents a "historicist" orientation, that is, to confirm the "contemporary" through a simple time sequence standard, which also means that this present moment will be replaced by the next moment. However, the original designation of "contemporary literature" is clearly not within the reach of this "homogeneous historical time"[2]. In 2009, Zhang Xudong once again put forward the contradictions contained in the "history of contemporary literature" at a higher theoretical level, and introduced another concept of time:
"Contemporary literary history" is a paradoxical concept in the strict sense, because "contemporary" should not have "history", "contemporary" is an eternal "present", it has a tension, and once the "eternal present" has to historicize itself, it actually denies itself. The original meaning and political radicality of the concept of "contemporary literature" comes first from the first thirty years of "contemporary literature", which is a heroic, creative process of "de-historicization", a positive meaning of "contemporaneity"; and the next thirty years are the historicization, or decadence or mythologization, of this contemporaneity itself... [3]
The "contemporaneity" of the "heroic, creative 'non-historicization' process" of the first thirty years is precisely the "present" that "does not occur only in the chronicle", but "in the desire, in the pressure, in the transformation of time". [4] In the late 1950s and early 1960s, New China formally expressed for the first time the meaning of "contemporary" "origin" that broke away from the time of the chronicle and constantly enriched itself:
The mission of the revolutionary literary cause, which is an integral part of this revolution [the socialist revolution], is to establish on the mainland a new literature of history, socialist literature. ...... Around and for one center: literature and the working people are combined to become the literature that truly belongs to the working people. [5]
Therefore, the "contemporary literature" is not suitable for "writing history" not only has its negative aspects (as Tang Tao said), but also its positive aspects, that is, this kind of literary practice itself has profoundly imprinted the foundational significance of new China. Furthermore, when the term "history of contemporary Chinese literature" appeared explicitly in the late 1950s and early 1960s[6], it was more like a capture of the trajectory of a project full of "presentness", and the so-called "history" was closer to the meaning of Hegelian dialectics, not losing itself but constantly returning to itself. It must be noted that the initial configuration of "contemporary literature" carries the requirements laid down by the "speech" as part of the "revolutionary machine" and to serve the general political purpose. [7] The relevant literary and linguistic experience is in line with this "revolutionary literary undertaking" - consciously inheriting and developing the May Fourth "new literature" and actively transforming local and folk traditions, thus opening up the "Chinese style". [8] In a sense, "contemporary literature" can indeed be said to be a continuation of "modern literature"—such literature, as Ji Jianqing puts it, is not "a category of complete self-discipline, but a cultural practice that consciously connects with the people, a space open to social life that constantly expands its boundaries, a tradition that extends and unfolds towards an uncertain and called-up future"[9] and ultimately becomes "part of the efforts of modern Chinese to construct its own subjectivity". However, the concept of "modern literature", which contains the fundamental pursuit of "modern China", cannot completely alleviate the tension and contradictions of "contemporary literature" itself. Rather, since "contemporary literature" must always face all the contradictions of the "present" and carry all the theoretical complexities and historical consequences, it is not only a rejection of "modern literature" in the sense of literary history, but also a "negation" of it in the dialectical sense—meaning the concretization of the more abstract principle of "modern China".
Mao Zedong's "Speech at the Yan'an Forum on Literature and Art", Jiefang Daily Publishing House, 1943 edition
Thus, there are two levels of "contemporary literature" here: "contemporary literature" as part of the revolutionary machine and now more as historical objects; the other "contemporary literature" in the sense of non-historical homogeneous time; which, although necessarily "literature" at the moment, contains the first kind of "contemporary literature" and carries all historical consequences and contradictions at the same time. The fundamental interest of the study of this kind of contemporary literature will necessarily not be a glimpse of the new phenomenon of current literature, nor a simple definition of the object of "science" and the defense of disciplinary boundaries, but to find higher unity and unrealized potential in the discontinuities of history and the folds of the present.
It is also in this sense that the sense of crisis in contemporary literary studies has universal cognitive significance. - All of them are responses to the above historical configuration and its current situation. In a nutshell, two major problems are repeatedly mentioned: one is "breaking"; the other is "ending" or "limiting". The former highlights the differences between the literary practices of the "first thirty years" and the "last forty years" and the difficulty of their integration, and is also summarized as a reciprocating movement between "people's literature" and "people's literature", especially the unremitting questioning of the possible connection between the people's literature and art in history (including its successful or unsuccessful "absorption" of "human literature") and the "people's literature" that has yet to be generated. [11] The latter showed signs as early as Wang Xiaoming's "six worlds" theory (that is, the redivicing of the literary map brought about by the rise of online literature),[12] which was confirmed in Li Yunlei's "the end of new literature",[13] and luo Gang recently continued to promote related thinking. [14] If the consciousness of "rupture" is related to the overall historical life of the practice of "contemporary literature" determined by the "speech", then the consciousness of "end" points to the crisis of textual form and language experience opened by the May Fourth New Literature. The cognitive opportunity contained here lies in the fact that contemporary literary research needs to be based on the fundamental political legitimacy and active energy of contemporary China, and think about higher unity in the fracture with higher wisdom; at the same time, after the decline of the old literary and life connection mechanism and the increasing institutionalization of "pure literature", it is necessary to face the challenges brought by capital, media and emerging sensory technologies, retranslate the "past" and construct the "future". On at least the previous issue, contemporary literary studies have highlighted a certain sense of consciousness and the impulse to engage in a dialogue with other contemporary human discourses, such as redrawing the core issues of seventeen years of literature from the dialectical relationship between the two "thirty years" and outlining the vitality and crisis of Chinese socialist practice[15]; or starting from the question of "national form", activating thinking about the relationship between "revolution" and "civilization". [16]
However, after clarifying the awareness of the macro problems involved in the study of "contemporary literature", we also need to delve into the existing analytical framework, theoretical premise and working methods. The replacement of contemporary literary research methods is not without premise, but also has specific objects of dialogue; any specific research can eventually only appear as a partial form of knowledge, although this partial knowledge can be prepared for the transformation of more general knowledge. The analysis that follows may be called an internal critique of an approach, attempting to clarify the core components commonly shared by research today. Of course, it should be noted here that the academy's knowledge production and its main methodological updates are mainly aimed at the literature of the 1950s and 1980s, that is, the "contemporary literature" as a historical object. The study of "current literature" has long produced a kind of differentiation: on the one hand, it is a review of "serious literature"; on the other hand, it is a "cultural study" of more commercial and entertaining online literature and various "readings". [17] In general, the two do not show particularly innovative knowledge production; or are at the "low end" of the contemporary knowledge production chain, which has a strong dependence on the theoretical tools and even methodological perspectives of other humanities and social sciences.
II. The Constituent Elements of Contemporary Literary Studies and Their Critique
If the trend of "reinterpretation" for the first time highlights the research value of "contemporary literature" and thus loosens the modern view of history and Enlightenment thinking since the reform, then the sincere criticism of "reinterpretation" is a metaphor for the emergence of the first core element of contemporary literary research in the past two decades. In He Guimei's relevant discussion, her criticism focuses on two points: First, the text center theory under the shroud of grand theory. Second, the "deconstruction" approach is based on revealing the rifts in the institutionalized narrative of the 1940s and 1970s, but it cannot respond to "how the literature (culture) of this period constructed such a historical narrative, what conflicts and adjustments it experienced in the construction process, and ultimately what factors led to the 'invalidity' of this narrative".[18] Although it must be admitted that it was precisely the problem consciousness of "reinterpretation" (critique of the mechanism of capitalist cultural production) and theoretical tools (left-wing critical theory) that for the first time made it possible for "contemporary literature" to regain its own historicity, this vision, which was deeply influenced by the study of North American comparative literature, suppressed further "historicization". It is precisely by overcoming these two defects that contemporary literary research continues to expand from the "text" to the periphery of the text and even to the grander socio-historical practice, and also temporarily suspends the "critical" consciousness, "restoring" the mechanism of literary production with a seemingly more objective and calm attitude, studying the details of the "historical scene", and reconstructing the literary links in the overall history. Although there is no direct dialogue relationship with "reinterpretation", Hong Zicheng's works such as "Introduction to Contemporary Chinese Literature" written in the mid-to-late 1990s did start a trend of "historicization" in its place. [19] Due to the ambiguity of the value orientation of "historicization" itself and its openness to the surrounding humanities and even the social sciences, this line of thought has gathered a variety of research efforts and made it share a methodological and attitude identity: that is, by constantly appealing to the "truth" of history, on the one hand, it continues to intellectually correct the existing literary history narrative, on the other hand, it is always vigilant against the danger of "theorizing" and avoiding the projection of the subjective position of the researcher. In the loose box of "historicization", there is both a way to attach importance to the excavation of historical materials[20], and there are also expositions that consciously introduce social history, emotional history, and even political economy. However, the continuous repetition and even intensification of such a tendency may also expose the poor state of existing literary research knowledge, suggesting that the knowledge production mechanism of the academy has gradually been "normalized".
Tang Xiaobing, ed., Reinterpretation: Popular Literature and Ideology, Oxford University Press, 1993
Among the various "historicization" operations, "the study of modern and contemporary Chinese literature from the perspective of social history" shows a more conscious methodological consciousness. The first key word in his observation of Chinese revolutionary literature-cultural practice is "in-embedding": "In the face of the literary writing based on the in-embedded perspective in the 1940s and 1970s, it is necessary to go deep into the social process and social composition in which it is embedded, in order to truly understand the trajectory of change and the energy contained in the country, society and the people- that literature pursues." [21] This seems to have merely restored common sense that literary practice itself forms part of history, and therefore must study literature "historically". [22] However, there was already an intentionality: "an attempt to approach the living world of the work". In other words, the "sociohistoric vision" meticulously sorts out the literary-cultural and socio-political-emotional bodies of the 1950s and 1970s, and its intention is by no means simply "historicized". Here, we vaguely encounter the "end" of "historicization". The "re-embedding" of the "social-historical vision" may contain an interpretive paradox that is difficult to dispel: once we have restored the entire historical structure of literature and its surroundings, how exactly does this radical "historicization" respond to the historical consequences of literature in the 1950s and 1970s? How can you say something more than that consequence? Thus, "literature" can be re-embedded in "socio-history", but it is not willing to be submerged in the history of the whole , because as an objective product of history , it has completed its trajectory. What is intriguing is this overflow of "embedding", this hermeneutic sense of "horizon blending".
The point that the perspective of social history and even any "historicization" of the idea does not fully point out or even dare not be clear is that literary research contains more expectations for literature. The dissatisfaction with the social history perspective may be expressed as follows: the holistic vision of embedding literature into the contemporary historical process and the structure of reality is indeed the promotion of "historicization", but the formal problem of literature has not yet been properly resolved. Lu Yang's criticism may be seen as a further intensification of the "social history vision": in addition to the overall expectation of historical content given by the social history vision, it is also necessary to explore an integrated vision of the interconnection of political practice, social production and literary and artistic life, as well as a new concept of "literature". "Through the complementarity of different kinds of materials, the sense of presence, situation and acceptance of the art form is restored" [24]. Thus, "literary" refers to two characteristics: (i) literature participates in the construction of practice, which is a link in practice; without literature, the complete empirical form of reality would be different. (ii) Literature can reproduce the hidden parts of practice itself—crises, paradoxes, difficult problems—and construct a possible world; these "issues" are not solved and are therefore open to the present. The essence here is that "form" can say "more" than ordinary historical memory, and can connect to a more complete and vivid living world and its imaginative dimension. This living world cannot be fully presented in historical accounts, nor can it be reduced to objective historical consequences. In this sense, it is both history and more than history.
Hong Zicheng, "Introduction to Contemporary Literature", Guangxi Education Publishing House, 2000
To criticize "historicization" by raising the question of "form" can lead either to a conservative posture of defending "literature" or to a more productive line of thought—which instead actively absorbs "historicization." This means not only that literary "forms" in a broad sense—from language choices and stylistic tendencies to larger "literary" frameworks—are the first object of any literary study, but also that deciphering the "content" of literary "forms" can connect the structural elements of social practice and thus prepare for further mapping the basic forms of history and society. In any case, at the impasse of "historicization", the core element of "form" emerged. The "form" here points to an indelible "difference" that highlights the few subtleties and makes them new cognitive-interpretive objects. Even in the seemingly old aesthetic context of "socialist realism", "form" is an extremely important link. In 1956, drama newspapers discussed the issues of "artistic reality" and "real life" on stage, touching on very subtle issues of form, perception and aesthetic conventions:
In one performance, there is a bench under the big tree, which is an important performance area in front of the stage, and the lighting designer illuminates the shade and darkness under the tree according to the reality of life, and as a result, the important performance area becomes dim and dull. To do so is to violate the laws of the stage, to lose the truth of art, and to be unable to express the truth of life. If we design the light according to the reality of life and the so-called "light source" like this, then we cannot play the drama of night and dusk. It is best to play the drama on a sunny day, otherwise the actors will have to whiten their strength on the stage, and the audience will have to stare dryly offstage. Everything we do – directing, setting, costumes, lighting, effects, music... It is all about conveying ideas to the audience through living people and actors, and it is not possible to create an atmosphere on stage alone without serving the actors. [25]
The real "light source" state cannot be copied to the stage, and the "light" here has a different "form" than the life scene. If socialist theatrical art wants to achieve the goal of infecting and educating the audience, it must to a certain extent violate the "truth"; in other words, it must re-produce the "truth of art" in its own formal configuration. This case suggests that although socialist literature and art emphasize the connection between life and art, specific works are always produced under differentiated formal conditions, and their actual effects are also achieved through special forms. Only by first grasping these subtle differences and paying attention to the historical meaning and theoretical potential of these differentiated forms can literary research truly find its own way of knowledge production.
"History" and "form" thus become two intermediated elements. "History" constantly constructs real intermediaries for "forms" and connects them to larger social spheres. The "form" constantly releases subtle differences, loosening the "history" that has been confirmed again. In a deeper sense, "history" and "form" can form a relationship on a larger level. Especially in the literary practice of the 1950s and 1970s, the expression of literary forms often had a mutually reinforcing relationship with the styles of social practice. For example, the "mobilization structure" mentioned in Cai Xiang's "Revolution/Narrative" is not only a form of social practice, but also a form of narrative in agricultural cooperative novels such as "Great Changes in the Mountains and Countryside"; conversely, the novel can once again spread the mobilization structure. Literature is "embedded" in the whole of social practice, and its formal expression is often more directly engraved with traces of social interaction forms. After the end of the basic mechanism of "seventeen years of literature", the relationship between the basic forms and stylistic elements of current literary writing and today's social production relations and life forms needs to be rediscovered from a new perspective.
Zhou Libo' Great Changes in The Mountains and Countryside, Writers Publishing House, 1958
At the end of "historicization", those "forms" that need to be explained are always revealed; and the meaning of "forms" is related to the fundamental aspects of the "contemporary" structure of contemporary literary research— which is also the third core element. He Guimei's hint is very appropriate here: "The ultimate goal of 'historicization' is not a kind of positionless objectivist historical research. ...... The ultimate appeal to the 'historicization' of contemporary China and its literary expression should be the historical and cultural consciousness of the Chinese experience, rather than the confirmation of certain abstract values." [26] "Self-consciousness" points to the cultural politics of the present moment. This is a "presupposition" that cannot be escaped before any "historic" work unfolds. If "historicization" means a kind of "specialization of universality", then "cultural politics" means to put forward the universal demands and potentials of existing historical practices and unfolding social practices. In the end, "historicization" cannot escape "(cultural) politicization", but this "politicization" has its own unique and fundamental meaning:
Since Nietzsche, the cultural superiority of modern Western culture has actually been based on this critical, revaluation relationship and action, rather than simply basing it on the egocentric universalist defense of "what I have," "what I have built," and "what I have accomplished, as has been the case in the past." Therefore, simple thinking such as "comparison of Chinese and Western cultures", cultural imperialism, and "clash of civilizations" has not had much significance on the issue of contemporary cultural identity, at least not grasping the core of the problem. Because the fundamental questions of contemporary cultural politics have become questions such as "how can I be", "who am I" and "what do I want in the end". [27]
"Cultural politics" establishes a measure of value for our "present" (not just a law and standard, of course). For the study of contemporary literature, cultural politics also plays a role as the third item between "historicization" and "form" concerns. Because the hidden core of contemporary literary research and the true "present" purpose are necessarily cultural and political, it can also be said that this is "a concrete embodiment of people's practice and ideological activities, which includes historical facts and interpretations of history." The interpretation of history is to find and discover the causal relationship between historical facts in order to complete the establishment of the historical view and the writing of historical texts. This understanding and interpretation is not only a passive statement according to the facts, but also contains an active and self-conscious sense of purpose, that is, position selection, value judgment, thinking guidance, and the confirmation of evaluation scale and evaluation mechanism, and finally establishes an ideological system with distinct ideological attributes. [28] It is just that the "forms of life" that individual researchers expect to be planned from history and form are not uniform or even contradictory. But in any case, "cultural politics" is a kind of commitment problem that any research cannot avoid, a collective ethical-political impulse that cannot be bound by discipline and specialization, and the "fact itself" that we will eventually face.
Zhu Yu, Socialism and "Nature": A Study of Chinese Aesthetic Controversy and Literary and Art Practice in the 1950s and 1960s, Peking University Press, 2018
Iii. The "contemporary" structure of contemporary literary studies
Historicization, formal concern, and cultural politics mediate each other, forming the basic structure of contemporary literary studies as I understand it. Clarifying the three is not only an internal critique of existing research methods, but also has the potential to open up a more dynamic research horizon. The "historicization" element not only presents the "rational" reflection and "objectification" orientation of the hegemonic humanities and social sciences since the 19th century, but also contains the opportunity to reintroduce "historical materialism". Thorough "historicization" means a consistent self-reflection and criticality— both for subjects and objects; therefore, it is also called "mutual subjects" and "mutual objects", that is, "the interpreter should respect the subjectivity of the object, not use the values and ideologies of the interpreter to cover the historicization, but should see the unfolding logic and inner historical vision of the historical object." This process of studying the object as the subject is also a process of self-objectification of the interpreter, enabling him to understand his own position more objectively in the deep relationship between history and reality" [29]. At the same time, the background of "cultural politics" eventually makes "historicization" abandon the neutral view of nihilism, infuse it with vitality, and constantly establish the foundation for a more ideal and desirable world of life in strict and meticulous professional work. Perry Anderson's "conjunctural explanation" of European and American modernism is a model of this "historicization." In his view, the artistic currents (such as Expressionism, Cubism, Futurism, and Surrealism) that were subsumed under the label of "modernism" in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were born in a triple socio-historical "coordinate" interweaving, thus possessing a strict temporal and spatial prescriptiveness and having to present a limited historical life:
European modernism flourished in a space in which a classical past could still be exploited, a technical present that remained uncertain, and a political future that remained unforeseeable. Or, in other words, European modernism arose in an intertwined pattern of a semi-aristocratic dominant order, a semi-industrial capitalist economy, and a labor movement that did not fully emerge and did not completely rebel. [30]
Where Anderson's "coordinates" of socio-historical situations transcend the "historical context" in the general sense is that he emphasizes the "synergy" of the three elements, but does not require "reproduction" of each of them in a specific analysis. Thus, he can explain the emergence of Latin American "modernism" in the same way in the 1980s: the pre-capitalist oligarchy (landlords) is still stubborn, the capitalist economy is developing rapidly but extremely unstable, and the socialist revolution may break out. The birth of Chinese modernism in the 1980s during the reform era can also be "historicized": the socialist system and its official "aesthetic" premise, the economic changes brought about by the reform and the turmoil in the living world, and the expectation of the arrival of some new "change".
Once the history of "form" is thoroughly revealed, literary studies must be able to provide a unique and powerful humanistic knowledge that will not only prove that any form has its historical life and contribute to the understanding of the complex "situation" experience from which it is born; moreover, in the intentional nature of "cultural politics", the text object chosen as an analysis can also unleash the potential of different forms of life. For example, the "style" of Zhou Libo's short stories of the 1950s and 1960s itself constitutes a "life" pattern that has not been fully revealed: the moving reproduction of the socialist world of life as the "state" of "life", whose meaning is often hidden in the usual political and religious discourse, has become the fundamental premise for re-examining the more complete and powerful experience of Chinese socialism. [31]
Zhou Libo (1908-1979)
Therefore, "cultural politics" means a key link in the "contemporary" structure of contemporary literary research, but it needs history-form to mediate with it, so as to constitute a truly productive and universal way of thinking and academic practice, and also make contemporary literary research truly contemporary. The present is not only an "inevitable" consequence of history, but also fundamentally about how to liberate our "future" by constantly reinterpreting the past:
According to the standard view, the past is fixed, what has already happened can no longer be changed, cannot be canceled, and the future is open, dependent on unpredictable contingencies. We should reverse this standard view here: the past is open to retrospective reinterpretation, and the future is closed—because we live in a deterministic universe. This does not mean that we cannot change the future; but only that in order to change our future, we should first (not "understand" but) change our past, reinterpret the past in a new way,—— liberate from the future determined by the previously dominant past horizon, toward another. [32]
If the literary-cultural product must be expressed as something of the "past", this "past" itself carries the complexity of the past-present-future. Thus, contemporary literary studies, with all the contradictions it carries, points out the universal truth of humanistic academic research: the state of union between history, form, and the inevitable third item, cultural politics. In other words, in the sense of academic labor and working style, this also means that contemporary literary research necessarily requires the unification of social sciences, aesthetics and political philosophy, and always embodies a kind of self-consciousness. This is the situation in which contemporary literary studies must endure and be creatively developed.
exegesis:
[1] Tang Tao, "Contemporary Literature Is Not Suitable for Writing History," Wen Wei Po, October 29, 1985.
[2] For "homogeneous historical time" and "differentiated time", see Perry Anderson's discussion: "Homogeneous historical time ... Each of these moments distinguishes itself from the others only because it is located after it, but for the same reason each moment also becomes an exchangeable unit in this infinitely reproducible sequence and coincides with the other moments. ...... But Marx's own conception of historical time in the capitalist mode of production is very different: it is a complex, differentiated time. Among them, each period is discontinuous with other periods, and even its own heterogeneity. ”Perry Anderson, Modernity and Revolution, from Cary Nelson and Laurence Grossberg ed. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture，Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp.321-322.
[3] Zhang Xudong, Contemporary and Literary History, Critical Literary History: Modernity and Formal Self-Consciousness, pp. 295, 298, Shanghai, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2021.
[4] See Giorgio Agamben, What is the Contemporary?, from Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus? trans.by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford, California, 2009, p.47.
[5] Institute of Literature, Chinese Academy of Sciences, New Chinese Literature in the Past Decade, pp. 16, 21, Beijing, Writers Publishing House, 1963.
[6] For example, the Department of Chinese of Central China Normal University, ed., Drafts of the History of Contemporary Chinese Literature, Beijing, Science Press, 1962.
[7] See Zhang Xudong, A Critical Literary History, p. 341
[8] See He Guimei, Writing "Chinese Style": Contemporary Literature and the Construction of Ethnic Forms, Beijing, Peking University Press, 2021.
[9] Ji Jianqing, "What is the "Modern" of "Modern Literature": A Historical Investigation and Rethinking of the Starting Point of Modern Chinese Literature", Literary Review, No. 4, 2015.
[10] Ji Jianqing, "What is the "Modern" of "Modern Literature": A Historical Investigation and Rethinking of the Starting Point of Modern Chinese Literature", Literary Review, No. 4, 2015.
[11] See He Guimei, "Historical Narrative and Disciplinary Development of Contemporary Literature", in Wen Rumin et al., eds., Outline of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature Disciplines, Beijing, Peking University Press, 2005. Luo Gang, "'Contemporary Literature': Unavoidable Reflections: A Review of An Academic History," Contemporary Literature, No. 1, 2019.
[12] Wang Xiaoming, "Six Points of the World: Today's Chinese Literature," Literary Review, No. 5, 2011.
[13] Li Yunlei, "The End of New Literature and Its Related Problems", Southern Literary Circles, No. 5, 2013.
[14] Luo Gang, "The Limits" and "Boundaries" of "Contemporary Literature"", Literary and Art Controversy, No. 2, 2021.
[15] See Cai Xiang, Revolution/Narrative: Chinese Socialist Literature- Cultural Imagination (1949-1966), Peking University Press, Beijing, 2010.
[16] See He Guimei, Writing "Chinese Style": Contemporary Literature and the Construction of National Forms, Chapter VI and Concluding.
[17] For a reflection on Chinese mainland "Cultural Studies", see Ni Wei, "Building Useful Humanistic Knowledge: A Re-Departure of Cultural Studies", Literary Theory and Criticism, No. 3, 2019.
[18] Look at He Guimei, "'Reinterpretation'—Textual Analysis and Historical Deconstruction," Tang Xiaobing, ed., Reinterpretation: Popular Literature and Ideology (Revised Edition), pp. 276-277, Beijing, Peking University Press, 2007.
[19] See He Guimei's comment: "New research breakthroughs unfold in the aspect of 'historicizing' contemporary literature. Among them, it is particularly noteworthy of Hong Zicheng's research on contemporary literary history since the 1990s. ...... A basic starting point is to "historicize" the category of 'contemporary literature'. The meaning of 'historicization' here is to regard 'contemporary literature' as a historical concept and literary form with specific connotations, to discuss when it appeared, how to establish its own legitimacy in the specific pattern of literary power relations, and how its literary norms were constructed and unfolded. Writing the "Chinese Style": Contemporary Literature and the Construction of National Forms, p. 513.
[20] See Wu Xiuming, "How Contemporary Literary History Faces Historical Materials", Contemporary Literary Circles, No. 2, 2019; Zhang Jun, "My Opinion on the HistoricalIzation Trend of Contemporary Literary Research", Literary and Art Controversy, No. 9, 2019.
[21] Cheng Kai, "The Cognitive Value of Social History Perspective and Contemporary Literary Experience", Literary Theory and Criticism, No. 5, 2019.
[22] Ni Wei, "Social History Perspective and the Historicization of Literary Research", Literary Review, No. 5, 2020.
[23] Suzuki Shohisa, "The Tension of 'Social History Vision'," Literary Review, No. 5, 2020.
[24] Lu Yang, "History and Form: How New Integration is Possible," Literary Theory and Criticism, No. 4, 2019.
[25] Sun Weishi, "Striving to Create a Distinctive and Colorful Stage Art Image," Drama Newspaper, May 1956.
[26] He Guimei, "Writing "Chinese Style", p. 549.
[27] Zhang Xudong, Cultural Identity in the Era of Globalization: Historical Reflections on the Discourse of Western Universalism, p. 336, Shanghai, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2021.
[28] Zhang Fugui, "The Construction of a Discourse System for Contemporary Chinese Literature Research", Chinese Social Sciences, No. 10, 2019.
[29] He Guimei, Writing "Chinese Style", p. 550.
[30] Perry Anderson, Modernity and Revolution, from Cary Nelson and Laurence Grossberg ed. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, p.326.
[31] See Zhu Yu, "The "Midwife" of Natural History: Zhou Libo's Political Discussion on the "Style" of Short Stories of the 1950s and 1960s," Journal of Modern Chinese Literature Research Series, No. 4, 2021.
[32] Slavoj i ek, Hegel in a Wired Brain, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2020, pp.130-131