Private Writing And Public Narrative

Focusing on the relationship between the diaries of the May Fourth writers and the "modernity" of literature,this paper mainly discusses how these diaries entered the historical process of Chinese literature with a new attitude under the macro background of literary transformation,and presented a tension structure between "private writing" and "public narrative".The paper is divided into three chapters.The first chapter is trying to say,as a kind of modern literary form,the diaries of the May Fourth writers went beyond the classical paradigm of "the world of predecessor",which was characterized by closure,stability and beauty.They turned into a kind of persistent,non-instantaneous "the present" area,embodying the sense of "changing" of modernity,and showing a tension structure between "personal writing" and "public narrative".The second chapter tries to explain how the writers’ diaries became a measure of "self-fashioning" and presented spiritual characters of modern subjects,when the writers encountered various "modern" experiences in both the "personal" living situation and the "public" historical situation.The third chapter tries to illustrate that the text production and text criticism of these diaries were seeking a balance between communicative activities in a "top-down" mode and communicative activities in public sphere.They presented both the classical origin and modern ideological trend of the diaries of the May Fourth writers.Also,they shaped the modern diary readers who advances in both active and passive lines of Enlightenment.