"Knowledge" Reshaping And Literary Production

Since modern times,the educated youth shaped by modern education has not been fully absorbed by cities.When those educated young people from the rural areas have to return to their home countryside,how do the rural areas in urgent need of talents digest their knowledge,their lifestyles,and aesthetic tastes? On the other hand,how do rural educated youths exert their self-worth and achieve physical and mental settlement? This has always been a problem encountered in the modernization process of China’s rural areas.In this regard,many people of insight have tried to reshape another kind of "knowledge" from different perspectives to respond to the aforementioned problems.Since this practical problem cannot be effectively solved,the creation of novels that involve the literary reproduction of "knowledge" reshaping is also faced with its insurmountable form problems and narrative difficulties.After the founding of the People’s Republic of China,the topic of "knowledge" reshaping under the new historical conditions was restarted.Many writers in the new literary production system have participated in this historical process’ s literary reproduction based on their historical imagination,aesthetic taste,and form creation,resulting in the phenomenon of writing novels with rural educated youth as the subject.On the one hand,rural-educated-youth novels are literary production and formal practice that reshape the process of "knowledge";on the other hand,the various problems encountered in the process of reshaping "knowledge" also reshape the formal texture,narration pattern,and aesthetic style of rural-educated-youth novels.Rural-educated-youth novels and "knowledge" reshaping are in a dynamic relationship of mutual mirror images,joint production,and mutual reshaping.Through edition comparison and "symptomatic reading,” this dissertation thoroughly examined the joint production and progression between history and literature,politics and aesthetics,as well as content and form,taking "knowledge" reshaping as a perspective as well as a medium and path.Further,this dissertation revealed the history of change,form evolution and internal predicament of rural-educated-youth novels.Apart from Preface and Conclusion,the whole paper is divided into four sections.The first chapter focuses on how the rural-educated-youth novels by Kang Zhuo,Liu Qing,Wei Junyi,and Zhou Keqin create a new "urban and rural cognition,” and create a literary form that fits their own life experience,value demand,and literary ideas,based on not overflowing the mainstream ideological narrative.This is the first step in reshaping " knowledge,” that is,establishing new rural prospects and laying the ideological foundation for the rural educated youths to return to their hometowns.Due to the sense of form and the interaction,stitching or gaming with the problems they respond,rural-educated-youth novels have become an investigation of the symptomatic path of the meaning production mechanism of the rural educated youths entering the city.The second chapter mainly deals with how the rural-educated-youth novels construct the possibility of combining rural construction knowledge.In this process,the knowledge of rural educated youth provides the rural construction with a new opportunity.On the other hand,this opportunity encounters its limits and crises due to the constraints of objective conditions and external circumstances.The narrative process of rural-educated-youth novels is a process of lively imagination to prove knowledge as well as a process of imaginatively solving the problem of knowledge modernity.During the process,rural-educated-youth novels are attempting to bridge the gap of discourse logic within the formality though imaginative solution.Also,rural-educated-youth novels often highlights its inherent limitations behind the effective narrative strategy.The main problem dealt within Chapter three is that the objective and structural problems encountered in the reshaping of "knowledge" are often transformed into an emphasis on the subjective initiative of the subject and then imaginatively resolved at the level of the rural educated youths.The unfolding of the objective structural proposition of knowledge and the rual areas is more of a recreation and reconstruction of rural educated youth’s subjectivity in the intermediary link.In the diachronic trajectory of rural-educated-youth novels,the discourse strategy and meaning production mechanism for shaping youths represent the decline of the vitality of knowledge and its subjects in the rual areas.The aesthetic and formal possibilities of rural-educated-youth novels are facing an inherent dilemma that is difficult to overcome.The fourth chapter mainly discusses Zhao Shuli’s and Haoran’s rural-educated-youth novels,which face the problem of shaping New Successor or counter propositions,that is,to transform the setbacks encountered by backward youth.To some extent,the first three chapters discusses the possibility of New Successor’ birth,while this chapter reveals the frustrations,limits,and crises of the New Successor.There is an obvious relation of tension,complementarity,and pluralism between the two aspects.The development of Zhao Shuli and Haoran’s rural-educated-youth novels not only constitutes a counterexample or "hardcore" of the previous rural-educated-youth novels but to a certain extent is a kind of conceptualization of the literary production and formal practice of "knowledge" reshaping.The concluding part believes that the perspective narrative of socialist realism not only endows rural-educated-youth novels with possibilities,but the perspective may also become a floating signifier in historical changes,leading to the inherent crisis of rural-educated-youth novels.This kind of problem and the setbacks of overcoming efforts have also become a historical opportunity for the rise of rural-educated-youth novels in the "Cultural Revolution" and even in the new period.