On The Country Novel Narratives Since The 1990s

"Modernization" entails the termination of rural China, which leads to the inevitable pain of "split" for villages and farmers during the historical process. However, due to influences of various "modernization" concepts, the rural narratives since the May 4th sought some "interpretations" for it in most times instead of facing the pain directly; in contrast, with the acceleration of modernization transformation and the increase of literary works reflecting the development reality in the transformation period in 1990s, the rural narratives also began to pay attention to the current situation in rural areas and present life of farmers frequently, as the result, the trend of following closely "the reality" and expressing the loss and sorrow of the authors mainly by realistic writing gradually becomes the "mainstream" in rural narratives since the late 1990s. The greatest significance of "realistic turn" of rural narratives, we believe, lies in that it faced the historical fate tragedy that the rural China (villages and farmers) was in for during the replacement of civilization and social transformation directly; but in fact, it was not attributed to introspection of literature;rather, it benefited from the dynamic changes of the times. The confusion and perplexity of authors highlights their lack of rational capacity. Therefore, they could only grasp the surface and failed to obtain the in-depth cognition of social history. This expression, though close to reality yet can not touch the reality, is unique and poetic with the honesty of its inner self. Nevertheless, its sensitivity was incapable of maintaining its persistency. This dissertation, entitled On the Rural Novel Narratives since the 1990s, centers around the understanding of "new changes" of rural narratives since 1990s and attempts to identify and analyze the ideological value and artistic value of the "new changes" through focusing on the relationship between literature and society and author’s psychology and cultural personality and other angles and seeks to forecast the overall development trend of rural narratives based on the factorial analysis, value analysis and historical analysis. The five parts that comprise the dissertation are as follows:The "Introduction" section analyzes the concept of "country novel narrative" in the first place, that is, analyzes the emergence and use background of "Vernacular Novel", "Rural Subject Novel" and " New Vernacular Novel" and illustrates the connotation of "country novel narrative" and the reason in using this concept in this paper through the two angles of comparison of values and literary concepts between users and variation of objects referred by different concepts; secondly, it analyzes the true nature of "new changes" from the perspective of relationship between current country novel narrative and reality of the times, clarifies the arguments and also describes the origin of the selection of this topic; finally, it elaborates the reason of selecting "new changes" of country novel narratives as the study object, related academic research and the research methods in this paper.The main body consists of three chapters. The first chapter makes an overall description of rural narratives since the 1990s from the perspective of evolution of ideological trend. It is believed that rural narratives since the 1990s showed a decrease of "concept" and increase of "reality".Seen from the perspective of pattern evolution, this is a process of "disintegration-cohesion", that is, the change of dominance of "modernization" in an oneness situation before the 1990s into a binary situation in which "concept" and "reality" were contradicted. Along with the growing social transformation, expression about concern for "reality" was increasingly frequent and widespread, and became the "mainstream" of contemporary country novel narratives in the new century. However, as it was mainly a hasty response to dynamic changes of the times, the "mainstream" was bound to bring about a kind of expression pressure which was aesthetic on the one hand and ideological and emotional on the other hand. Therefore, "Resistance" and "Changes" became a necessity. By taking "disintegration", "cohesion" and "dispersion" as its theme, the dissertation describes, analyzes and forecasts the process of the ideological evolution in three sections in a diachronic order. In the meantime, thematic analysis is given first priority while artistic analysis is taken into account as well.Chapter II focuses on character analysis, i.e. pays close attention to images of farmers created in the country novel narratives since 1990s from modern construction of farmers to see to what extent the narratives demonstrates the soul struggles and personality transformation Chinese farmers had gone through during the acceleration of social transformation. This chapter starts its argument from the spiritual metamorphosis process that farmers had experienced as the construction main body since 1990s:the first section focuses on the "pain of loss" of farmers as the social "underclass". It mainly examines the physical and spiritual weight loss after having experienced the fall from "masters" to "underclass" and the descriptions in the literature from the perspectives of "physical" suffering and "identity" anxiety. The second section mainly deals with the "pain of metamorphosis" farmers had experienced as the modern construction main body. It commences from the awkward situation of farmers when facing both "tradition" and "modern" to see weak points and strong points of rural narratives in the realistic intervention abilities. Section three mainly focuses on farmers’ "intermediate" "pain of wandering" between city and villages and "tradition" and "modern".It seeks to track down the farmers’"trance" as a result of co-action of continuous expansion of "cross zones" of cities and villages and their constant migration between cities and villages as modern civilization "sojourners" and then to see if the contemporary writers have a macroscopic and keen ability to grasp the social history and contemporary reality.Based on the first two chapters’ analysis of the phenomenon, the third chapter conducts a targeted analysis of the mentality of those writers when they write. Starting with the contradiction between sense and sensibility that those writers habitually come across when facing the "villages",it observes and analyzes the dilemma traditional rural narratives face during the dynamic and fierce changes in the reality. The first section discusses the restrictions on rural narratives caused by the "resentment and anger" of classic enlightenment narratives by taking Yan Lianke as the example. The second section, exemplified by Liu Qingbang, mainly discusses how the individualistic lyrical approach that the contemporary rural romantic narratives hold towards "villages" regress to a kind of closed and conservative interest-ism writing before the reality of the new era. The third section, through the analysis of "symptom" of Jia Pingwa’s recent works, explores the lack of rational capacity and cultural personality defects of Chinese writers generally behind the contradiction between "emotion" and "reason".The "Conclusion" discusses the subconscious motive of "regression" of literature and forecasts the future of rural narratives.