In the introduction to Harvard's New History of Modern Chinese Literature (hereinafter referred to as "History of Modern Literature"), Wang Dewei, editor-in-chief, explains the style of the book as follows: "Readers may perceive that the compilation of Harvard's Newly Edited History of Modern Chinese Literature has no shortage of Traces of Western Theory. For example, Benjamin's 'constellation map' and 'arcade plan', Bakhtin's 'crowd noise', Foucault's 'genealogy', or Deleuze's 'combination' theory, 'fold' theory, etc., can be cited as appendages. But rather than how this book was influenced by 'post-learning', it is better to say that the inspiration came from Mr. Qian Zhongshu's 'pipe cone science'. ”
A little deliberation is needed here: can Benjamin (including Bakhtin) be classified as a "post-learning"? Benjamin is partially similar to postmodernism, but the difference between the two is clearly greater: postmodernism regards grand narratives and totality as lies, and Benjamin continues the enlightenment project of criticism and liberation from Kant to Marx; Postmodernism believed that truth could only be relative, and Benjamin believed that truth was pure and absolute; Crucially, postmodernism merely "inherited" Benjamin's preference for fragments, which Henjamin wanted to use to recognize the whole. In other words, the fragment is not only a fragment, but also a miniature totality, which has something in common with Mr. Qian Zhongshu's "peeping at the sky with a pipe and pointing to the ground with a cone".
This article is from the B04 edition of the Beijing News Book Review Weekly's August 26 feature "Harvard's New History of Modern Chinese Literature: A "Good-Looking" Literary History.
"Theme" B01丨 Harvard's New History of Modern Chinese Literature: A "Good-Looking" Literary History
"Theme" B02-B03丨Wang Dewei's Literary History is a way to enter Chinese history and civilization
"Theme" B04丨 "Harvard's New History of Modern Chinese Literature" "Anything that has happened should not be regarded as an abandonment of history"
"Literature" B05 丨 Nguyen Tuk Thieu A fusion of classics and modernity
"Social Science" B06-B07 丨 "Sacrifice and Becoming a God" stops violence during ceremonies
"Children" B08 | "The Practical Cat Sutra of the Old Possum" These cats are very much like you and me
Written by Xu Zhaozheng
The multiple origins of modern Chinese literature
From many perspectives, the History of Modern Literature is imbued with Benjamin's breath, such as the occurrence of modernity in literary flux as the criterion of whether "literature" is "modern". Although this book was co-written by many people, there is a clue that was established before it was written, that is, Wang Dewei replaced the previous "overseas Chinese literature" and "world Chinese literature" with "Chinese language literature", and used Heidegger's "world" to set the general tone for "the modern world of Chinese literature". "Chinese Language Literature" emphasizes the inclusiveness of language, which dilutes the over-exaggerated meaning of "discrete" and "exile" in the concept of "overseas Chinese literature"; "Chinese literature in the 'world' "points out the phenomenon of modern China and the world being the main guests", thus reducing the gap between "world" and "China" in "world Chinese literature".
These subtle literary hearts point to the understanding that many authors of this book seek to highlight and even consistently understand that there is more than one beginning of modern Chinese literature, and the beginning of "modernity" comes from the interaction between "China" and "the world", which covers many forms of knowledge migration such as translation, travel, study abroad, and exile. So where should "modern Chinese literature" begin? The plan adopted in this book begins with the earliest example of interaction that can be found, namely, Yang Tingjun's definition of "literature" in the "Continuation of Generational Doubts" in 1635.
Western envoys in front of the emperor. Licensed by the Chinese Historical Photography Department of the British National Archives.
In addition to Yang Tingjun, a Confucian official who converted to Catholicism, the history of modern literature begins with Li Yan, Yuan Hongdao, Xu Wei, Ling Mengchu, Feng Menglong, and other writers who expanded the original category of "literature" as "pioneers of literary modernization." For the next three hundred years, Guo Shila, Ai Joseph, Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, etc. were all promoting this work. The article "Multiple Origins of Modern Chinese "Literature" finally writes about the "origins" of literary modernity found by Zhou Zuoren and Ji Wenfu in the late Ming Dynasty in the 1930s. As an opening statement, the author Li Yixue seems to respond to Benjamin's contemplation of history, such as articles 13 and 14 of the unpublished Outline of the Philosophy of History, written in 1940. Benjamin pointed out that refuting progressive beliefs is ultimately to refute the soil in which such beliefs were born, a kind of "similar, empty time." To this end, he spatialized and rewritten the original diachronic and artificially continuing time, proposing that "history is the subject of a structure ... Sit in a time filled with the existence of this moment".
There is usually only one "dependent arising", and this single dependent arising implies that the objectivity of the historical beginning and the writer are unquestionable, but when there is a "multiple dependent arising", it can be confirmed that the writer is adhering to the "present" consciousness of the present moment as Benjamin said. Benjamin's "present" comes from his "dialectic of pause", and he is determined to use the present as a stop to pause and look back, and here to restore the ambiguity of the past with quotations. This is also hinted at in the introduction to The History of Modern Literature: "Every point in time in the book can be seen as a historical tipping point. From it we witness the buried or forgotten meaning of the 'past'". This is the authentic Benjamin saying.
The context of literary modernity
If there is more than one beginning, it foreshadows that the next writing of this literary history will be the same as Benjamin's intention to challenge a single, solidified narrative, that is, as the introduction says: "Any modern path is achieved through countless variable and malleable stages." Therefore, how to practice this in practice, how to enrich the "similar and empty time" in the spatial field, is another place where the light of Benjamin shines in this book, and the participating authors will most likely focus their attention on those abandoned and forgotten events on the modern road of Chinese literature; If there is no way to get around a certain year and event, it always strives to explain the new meaning from another perspective.
This "newness" is not a greedy novelty, but is intrinsic to Benjamin's reference to Baudelaire's meaning of "scavenger": "He catalogs and collects whatever it loses, whatever it spurns, whatever it tramples on." In the Compendium of the Philosophy of History, Benjamin raises this image more explicitly to the level of a chronicler: "The chronicler who records the events of the past, regardless of priority, is based on the truth that nothing that has happened should be regarded as an outcast of history." This sentence can also be seen as the tacit general outline of the writing of the collaborators of the History of Modern Literature. In reading, you can find that the objects they care about have the following characteristics:
First, to select the origins of different aspects of "modern literature", such as morrison's completion of the first Chinese-English dictionary, the Chinese-Chinese Dictionary (Modernity of Translation: Morrison's Chinese Literature), from 1815 to 1822); In 1861, Gu Taiqing completed the first female-created long love novel "Dream of the Red Chamber" ("Female Writers of Early Modern China"); In 1872, Yinghuan Zouji, the earliest literary journal in China, was published (Media, Literature, and Early Chinese Modernity); In 1895, Fu Lanya published an advertisement for a novel contest in the "Declaration", which gave birth to the first modern Chinese novel "The Fast History of the Xi Dynasty" ("New Novel" Before the New Novel"); In 1897, Qiu Tingliang first proposed the concept of language reform in "On the Vernacular as the Basis of the Restoration" ("Language Reform and Its Dissatisfaction"); In 1905, Lin Chuanjia completed the first history of Chinese literature written by Chinese scholars ("Wen" and "The Earliest Literary History of China"); In 1916, While studying abroad, Hu Shi wrote his first vernacular poem ("Hu Shi and His Experiment") in a love letter.
Martino Martini (1614-1661) Records of the Tatar Wars (1654) Permission to library at the University of Montleton. The image is from the article "Dutch Drama, Chinese Fiction and the Open World Picture" in the book. The fall of the Ming Dynasty "became the subject of global writings such as Chinese novels, Jesuit histories, and Dutch dramas... Through the flow of goods, people and information, the world becomes a single, interconnected community. ”
Second, to perceive the context of literary modernity from historical details and connections. In 1650, the Dutch press reported on the fall of the Ming Dynasty, arguing that "through the flow of goods, people and information, the world became a single, interconnected community" (Dutch Drama, Chinese Novel and the Open World Picture); The article "The Collision of Time: Modern Visions and Nostalgic Imaginations" equates two events that occurred in 1792: the former is the publication of Cheng Yiben of "Dream of the Red Chamber", which readers who love it to reminisce about "Yesterday's World", and the latter is the departure of the Macartney Mission to visit China, which forces those who look back on the glorious past to wake up from a big dream, this discussion is extremely tense, and the commentators also point out the metaphor of the two-faced god of modernity (recalling the past/looking forward to the future) here; In 1909, Rong Hong published his autobiography in English, My Life in China and America, in New York, and six years later, the book was published in China under the title of "The Gradual Chronicle of Western Learning and Eastern Learning" and republished in the following decades, but it all echoed very little, but the significance is that when Zhong Shuhe included it in the "Toward the World" series in 1981, this obsession that annihilated nearly a century of seeking modernity also resonated again with its contemporaries (": Trans-Pacific Translation").
Third, symbols that mark modernity. If it is said that looking forward to the future and recalling the past are two sides of modernity, then the vein of looking forward to the future can be used as an example in modern Chinese literature as Li Ruzhen's "Mirror Flower Edge" ("Taking the World as Home": "Chinese Women")," and Liang Qichao's "The Future of New China" ("Unfinished Translation and the Future of New Novels") that predicted women's liberation in sixty years; Recalling this vein of the past, you can take the oracle bone research that began with the discovery of oracle bones by Wang Yirong in 1899 ("Oracle, Dangerous Tonic..."). However, in the end, it is difficult to be absolute, and the two may be compatible.
Zhang Leping, The Last Frame of Sanmao's Journey from the Army (Source Declaration, October 4, 1947, 12th Edition). The image is from the article "Children's China: The Legend of Sanmao" in the book. The author of this article believes that "the story of Sanmao is one of the important pictorial narratives of the subjectivity of modern Chinese", and children have become a representative of modernity.
In addition to the above, the "History of Modern Literature" also hooked many unforgettable symbols of modernity, such as the 1916 "New Youth" published Li Dazhao's essay "Youth". The article points out that the word youth vividly conveys the understanding of modern Enlightenment intellectuals for the spirit of change of the times ("The Invention of "Youth" in Modern China"); It is also like "A Day in China" planned and published by Mao Dun in 1936; May 21, 1936, but rather than symbolizing the shift of world-left literature toward strict realism in the 1930s, this collection, selected from a total of 6 million words, reflects the beginning of a chinese intellectual interest in the fleeting "modernity," whatever conclusions they try to draw.
Another picture of the source flow of modernity
On the whole, these innumerable details look hilarious, but we cannot ignore the deeper attempts, that is, to give a new purpose to the details, scenes, and associations of the above re-salvaging ashore, which not only arouse the interest of the reader, but are also marked as interrelated coordinates, thus from the perspective of different synchronicities such as text innovation, language translation, article function, ideological trends, media dissemination, dialects and vernacular, which are consistently different from "continuous development according to the established schedule". A picture of the source flow of modernity.
What seems most interesting to me is that this literary history offers a possibility for the reader to participate in "writing"—again echoing Benjamin's views here; At the same time, despite the fragmentation and divergent arguments, it contains an ambition and interest in recounting a history of literary modernity, and allowing the author's voice to continue—and here it is also different from many "post-learning".
Text/Xu Zhaozheng
Editor/Zhang Jin Shen Lu
Proofreading/Xue Jingning