Research On The Criticism Of Akutagawa Ryunosuke In China

Akutagawa Ryunosuke is a leading figure in the Japanese Taisho literary world,the flag bearer of Japanese short stories,and is praised by Haruki Murakami as the national writer of Japan.Akutagawa has always had an inseparable relationship with the Chinese literary world.On the one hand,Akutagawa’s literary works were nourished by classical Chinese literature,and on the other hand,the critical studies of Akutagawa by Chinese scholars reflect the changing trends of Chinese literature like a mirror.Since Lu Xun’s first translation of Akutagawa’s works in 1921,the Chinese literary world has been paying attention to Akutagawa in an implicit or explicit manner.The study of Akutagawa in China dates back to the Enlightenment period of the May Fourth Movement and has a history of more than one hundred years,with each stage of translation criticism of Akutagawa’s works corresponding to the shifting trends of Chinese literary thought in each period.Therefore,the focus of this paper is to analyze the development of the entire contemporary Chinese literary trend by sorting out the criticism on Akutagawa in different periods.this paper consists of four chapters: Chapter 1 examines the study of Akutagawa Ryunosuke from 1917 to 1926 against the background of the individual enlightenment of the May Fourth Movement;Chapter 2 analyzes the study of Akutagawa Ryunosuke from 1927 to 1949 from the perspective of the left-wing class position;Chapter 3discusses the study of Akutagawa Ryunosuke in the new period,which focuses on the study of Akutagawa Ryunosuke in the context of modernism and humanism after the new wave of modernism came back into the country,and the fourth chapter examines Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s research in the context of market economy since the 1990 s.These four chapters form an organic system to sort out the translations of Akutagawa’s literary works in four historical stages of China’s modern and contemporary literary scene from a chronological perspective,so as to identify the dominant Chinese literary trends behind the translations of Akutagawa’s literature at each stage.The logic of this paper is as follows: During the May Fourth period,Lu Xun used the translation of The Nose and Rashomon as an exotic resource for his idea of“establishment of man”.In the 1930 s and 1940 s,left-wing literary figures with a mix of nationalism characterized Akutagawa as a class and then used some of his works for revolutionary propaganda.In the 1980 s,Chinese scholars explored the humanitarian discourse in Akutagawa literature in the context of Chinese modernism.Since the 1990 s,people have interpreted Akutagawa’s literature in an anti-materialistic and antiinstrumental way in the midst of the dilemma of consumerism and the “Great Debate on Humanism”.It is easy to see that when the contemporary Chinese literary world used Akutagawa literature as an exotic resource for its own use,its internal motives and reasons for interpretation coincided with the changes in literary and artistic thinking in the Chinese literary world during these four stages.From the enlightenment of the individual to the overwhelming of the nation-state over the individual,from the return of “the capitalized” person to the promotion of the humanistic spirit,this is the entanglement and construction of the nation-state and the individual in Chinese contemporary literature and art,and it is also the decisive force that implicitly influences the translation and interpretation of Akutagawa literature in the Chinese literary world.