毕业论文
外文文献及译文文献、资料题目：Critiquing the city, envision-
ning the country:Shen Congwen’s urban fictionvientiane
文献、资料来源：斯普林格雨声像什么
文献、资料发表（出版）日期：2009.11.25
学院：文学院
专业：汉语言文学
班级：2011级2班
姓名：xx
学号：xxxx
指导教师：xxx
翻译日期： 2015年03月30日
Critiquing the city, envisioning the country:Shen Congwen’s urban fictionja
Jie Lu
Published online: 25 November 2009
_ Akade ´miai Kiado ´ , Budapest, Hungary 2009
The essay studies Shen Congwen’s urban fictions i n the literary contexts of his native-soil fiction and contemporary urban fiction by the Shanghai school in modern Chine literature. It argues that Shen Congwen’s urban and rural writings demonstrate a profound irony: his perception of the disappearing rural idyllic and his panoramic repre-ntation are achieved through a modern nsibility as well as his dinchantment with the city, while his urban imagining/reprentation betrays an agrarianist distrust of the city part of an age-old anti-urban Confucian thinking. His ambivalent attitude towards modernity also betrays a n of loss in terms of his historical position regarding how to understand fundamental changes of his time as epitomized by the city. Nevertheless, Shen’s urban fiction has registered the initial efforts in modern Chine literature in co
ming to grips of the modern city as it was emerging from its traditional form to become the locus of modernity and site of fundamental socioeconomic and cultural transformation..
Shen Congwen (1902–1988) is one of the most important novelists in modern Chine literature. Productive and versatile, Shen Congwen worked in many genres ranging from poetry, short stories, novellas, and novels, to essays, and has produced volumes of work touching all kinds of subjects such as military life, rural folks, Miao ethnic people, family life, urbanites and intellectuals. His magnum opus includes Border Town, Long River, Xiaoxiao, Random Sketches on a Trip to Hunan, Congwen Autobiography, and many collections of short stories. Shen is best-known for his portrayals of rural West Hunan—anidyllic country both real and imaginative—with its local flavors, aboriginal customs, picturesque landscape, extraordinary lifestyles, festive conventions, linguist ic codes, and most of all, its colorful and rustic figures posssing ‘‘divine quality’’ (Wang 1992, p. 256), virility and moral purity. His rural writings also demonstrate a profound lyrical quality and poetic nsibility that are highly treasured in the Chine literary creation. He is often regarded as a forefather of root-eking or native-soil literature in China.
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Critics tend to focus on his writings on West Hunan, that is, his rural writings, as if they were most reprentative. However, Shen Congwen has written almost as much on urban themes; in fact his ur
ban fiction constitutes about half of his complete works, which is very unique among modern Chine writers. Admittedly, his urban fictions are not as imaginative and poetic as his rural fictions, and the urban scenes depicted are not as fascinating and exotic as his beloved West Hunan. In contrast to his rural writings, his urban fictions also lack the kind of aura possd by his rural works, and are banal and formulaic in their reprentation of an urban world filled with physically and psychologically distorted and spiritually impotent men and women. Yet, it is the opposition between the rural and urban that informs his understanding and reprenting both the city and the rural. His reprentation of rural folks and pastoral sceneries express his moral idealism. Shen eulogizes the healthy and elegant way of life and humane and harmonious relationship among rural people in contrast to the urban world reprented as the Other of his utopian West Hunan—corrupted and decadent. Shen himlf repeatedly emphasizes that he is esntially a country man, and that it is from the rural perspective that he obrves and evaluates urban society and its people. Ironically, however, it is exactly the modern cultural/existential condition epitomized by the ‘‘fallen’’ city that ma kes it possible for Shen Congwen to imagine and envision his utopian West Hunan. In other words, it is not the modern city and its culture that have fallen from the rural utopia. Rather his atemporal West Hunan derives its meaning and moral
authority by contrast with temporal urban culture. The irony also lies at the personal level of Shen’s life. As David Wang acutely points out, it is only after Shen has been uprooted from the soil that he cherishes and denied from any possibility of complete understanding that he values his rural home. This displacement is more than physical; it is intellectual and emotional as well (Wang 1991, p. 248). Thus it is the urban experiences that constitute the structure and groundwork of his uprootedness. Furthermore,this points to a paradoxical relationship between his rural and urban perspectives: he can only re-imagine and re-prent the idyllic when living away in urban space—it is a modern nsibility and milieu that inform his rural imagining; nevertheless, he critiques the city from his imagined pastoral idealism.
This essay examines lected urban fictions of Shen Congwen in the literary contexts of his native-soil fiction and contemporary urban fiction by the Shanghai school, and argues that that there exist contradictory impuls in Shen’s reprentation of the city. The coexistence of denial and control can be en in the abnce of urban geographic and public space and almost exclusive focus on interiority. To Shen, this paper argues, the fundamental problem of the city lies in its crisis of ‘‘life force’’—the lack of natural virility in both men and women of the city—the root cau for their moral degeneration. Thus in contrast to the natural environment in his rural writings, the urban interiority st
摩登家庭第三季下载ands for emasculating pressure and devitalizing effects of the urban life. Nevertheless, Shen’s city can hardly be called a modern city, nor is it a purely traditional one; it is more an extension of the rural, or a rural–urban continuum that characterizes traditional Chine urban–rural space. This ambivalent space somehow renders his urban critique less focud on modernity per than on the transitional city that encompass both traditional and modern features. On the other hand, if there exists a deep melancholy in his gentle and poetic writings on West Hunan (Wang 1991, p. 249), then his negation of the modern city betrays a profound cityphobia and anxieties about the threat that the emerging modern urban culture pos to traditional moral values and individual identity, as well as perplexities about urban eligibility. Shen’s rural idealism is partl y an articulation of the age-old anti-urban tradition. Ironically however, to label Shen simply as a rural intellectual is less than accurate, for his imaginative and nostalgic reprentation of the pastoral and his melancholy at its impending loss can only be produced, perceived and felt by a sophisticatedmodern nsibility.
City as interiority
Shen’s urban fiction exhibits a strong anti-urban bias, and is virtually the negative Other of his rural writing on West Hunan. In general, his fiction translates the dichotomy of country and city in moral terms of good and evil. Criticism tends to examine this dichotomy mainly in terms of characterization
and family and love relationships. For instance, most urbanites in Shen’s fictions are physically ill. To Shen, the urbanite and the sick person are almost synonymous (Wang 1998, p.
88). The urban people are suffering such problems as tuberculos, mental disorder, insomnia, and weak nerves. For instance, in the short story‘‘Sansan,’’ the urban youth who visits the cou ntryside has a pale white face, is dresd in white, and suffers from the advanced stage of tuberculos. As one of his rural characters in ‘‘Sansan’’ comments, ‘‘Who can be sure of all tho names for dias city folk have? If you ask me, city people like to get sick—that’s why they have all tho names for dias. Out here we can’t stop working just on account of illness, so apart from malaria we just get fevers and the runs. All tho dias with the fancy names haven’t ever come to the countryside’’ (Kinkley 2004, p. 140). Thus in ‘‘Portraits of Eight Steeds’’ (Shen 2002c,Vol. 8, pp. 197–225), the university professors suffer either insomnia or dysfunctional kidney, while in
‘‘A Gentleman’s Wife’’ (Shen 2002a, V ol. 6, pp. 213–242), the husband is paralyzed and xually impotent.
To Shen, what is fundamentally lacking in the urbanites is the life force. The people cannot transcend their trivial and quotidian living, and their ns are dulled by their immediate material gai
ns and interests. Physical weakness is only an outward manifestation of psychological and spiritual lassitude of the city people, ‘‘especially tho who lived the life of a scholar or intellectual. Most of them were lazy, overcautious, stingy, and meanwhile malnourished and witho ut sufficient sleep and fertility’’ (Shen 1998, p. 240).Their moral degeneration and cultural decadence are specifically reflected and embodied in the love and family relationships. Free love and marriage, one of the core ideas advocated and promoted by the May Fourth Cultural Movement in the early 20s, are replaced by a loveless commodity exchange different only in form from the traditionally arranged marriage. This commodity transaction, like its patriarchal counterpart, puts women in a disadvantaged and powerless position, and thus creates tragedies and twisted mentalities. In ‘‘A Lady of the City,’’ the beautiful and graceful heroine, though born in an ordinary family, attracts all gentlemen of the upper class. After going through all kinds of bitter experiences—as a prostitute and concubine, she suffers deep sorrow and fear. She finally gains the true love of an officer who is ‘‘young, honest, and perfect’’ just as her beauty and youth are fading. In order to posss him completely and hold him permanently, she poisons and blinds him cretly. In ‘‘The Gentry Wife,’’ the family relationship is built on cheating, adultery, and hypocrisy. The husband and wife only maintain a superficial familial fac ¸ade, while each is engaged in a cret adultery, and the son and the concubine have an incestuous relationship. Eventually it is women who lo in the love games (Shen 2002b, V ol. 7, pp.
169–193). In exploring urban life, Shen’s fictions also bring out the profound rupture between romantic idealism cultivated by the May Fourth new culture and real social conditions in the midst of rampant materialism. Many educated youth can only aspire for romantic love but are rarely able to realize this love in marriage becau of poverty. Guo Moruo summarizes the situation succinctl y: ‘‘the ideal cannot be realized, and the realized is not ideal’’ (qtd. in Han 1994, p. 161). It is the pains and despairs of unfulfilled xual desires and romantic longings of some of his urban characters that Shen characterizes urban culture as especially morbid and suppressive.
Of cour, critics are not wrongly directed in their reading of Shen’s critique of urban culture from the angle of family and love relationships. In fact most of Shen’s urban reprentation concentrates on the aspects of the society, and his urban fictions were once even labeled as ‘‘pink’’ works (Han 1994, p. 157). There is no doubt that Shen’s urban fiction depicts much the morbid social and human landscapes in the 20s and 30s’ urban China as family is the microcosm of the society. Nevertheless, an exclusive critical focus on characters and love/family relationships miss other aspects of Shen’s urban fictio n, namely the reprentation of the city itlf. To a large extent, Shen is interested in the interiority of urban life. He rarely describes physical contour of urban space, and even the interior space lacks detailed depiction. This abnce of urban space and focus on interiority certainly
foregrounds human relations and characterization. Indeed, living encapsulated and enervated lives, the characters are forced to deal only with one another. As a result, Shen’s urban fiction lacks the complex and multifaceted socioeconomic and cultural dimensions of the city and urban life; there is no interaction between characters and the city, which characterizes modern urban life. Possibly, his urban reprentation reflects his limit ed vision and perspective on the city and urban life; nevertheless, to reduce the city to a form of
interiority can also be understood as a way of mastering and controlling the city. Indeed, the rapid urban expansion and transformation at Shen’s time could be both perplexing and threatening, and cau anxieties, fears and loss of identity to an outsider from the rural area. To write the city, to render it as a knowable, legible and controllable prence is thus a way to alleviate the anxieties and fears s o as to reclaim the author’s identity and subjectivity.
快速祛斑Perhaps what most distinguishes Shen’s rural writings from his urban ones is his visual perception and reprentation. His West Hunan writings are marked by an ambition to visualize the whole countryside of West Hunan. We find that his scenic description occupies a large space in his rural fiction. It is lengthy and detailed, and often reinforced by minute records of local customs and historical facts. Nature is certainly important to the rural way of life. However, it is not pure nature, or
the state of nature unchanged by man, but rather humanized nature—the harmonious blending of mountains, river, clouds and rains with mills, boats, ports, dragon boats, little villages, animals, and most of all, humans—that constitutes the landscape of his countryside. The following description is from his most famous rural fiction, ‘‘The Border Town:”
The river was once known as the Yu Shui, famous in history, but now it was more
commonly known as White Stream. At Chenshow this river meets the Yuan Sui, and joins
its own purity to the muddy waters of the greater river. But if you climb towards the
sources of the White Stream, you will reach the Tayu caves near Nusu, where the water
is so pure that you can e the small pebbles and rocks thirty or forty feet below the
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surface of the water, and when the sun is shining you can even watch the fishes gliding
in the parts as ‘‘flowering cornelians.’’ The fishes em to be floating in the air. And all
along the banks there are great mountains shrouded in slender bamboos, ud for
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making paper; and though the asons change, the bamboos remain a deep, penetrating
skyscrapersand vivid greed. The hous near the river are surrounded with peach and apricot
groves, so that in spring wherever there were peach-blossoms there were also hous,
and wherever there were hous there was wine. You saw the hous by noticing the
purple-colored clothes which were hung out to dry. But when autumn and winter came,
the hous stood out against the cliffs and along the riverside, and you would e them
shining clear in the distance with their yellow mud walls and black roof-tiles, and they
were all perfectly placed in harmony with their surroundings. Travelers who loved
poetry or painting would crouch low in the boat for the whole of the thirty day voyage
如何提高语言表达能力upstream, never tiring of the splendors which Nature continually unfolded to his gaze.
There were miracles everywhere, and Nature was never more charming and captivating
than along the rivers of Szechuan and Hunan (Ti and Payne 1982, p. 195).
Here the author’s arch for a visual countryside is very much within the aesthetics of traditional Chine landscape paintings—humans are within nature, and nature includes humans. Unlike the anthropomorphized nature in Song Dynasty’s landscape paintings where tiny human figures are only decorations of nature however, it is humans that dominat e Shen’s rural landscape. Shen’s rural landscape does not stop here with the idyllic; it also includes the hustling and bustling life in the streets of the rural town:
Although the city was so eminently quiet and peaceful, River Road was rather an
exception to the general order, for it was there that the traders sought out their contracts
with the merchants from East Szechuan. There were hotels and lodging-hous for the
merchants, and barber-shops which were real shops, not just wandering chairs. There
