rcitiquing-the-city--envisionning-the-country-shen-congwen’s-urban-fction外文文献及译文大学论文.doc

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1、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 Congwens urban ction 文献、资料来源： 斯普林格文献、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 Congwens urban ctionJie LuPublished online: 25 N

2、ovember 2009_ Akade miai Kiado , Budapest, Hungary 2009The essay studies Shen Congwens urban ctions in the literary contexts of his native-soil ction and contemporary urban ction by the Shanghai school in modern Chinese literature. It argues that Shen Congwens urban and rural writings demonstrate a

3、profound irony: his perception of the disappearing rural idyllic and his panoramic repre-sentation are achieved through a modern sensibility as well as his disenchantment with the city, while his urban imagining/representation betrays an agrarianist distrust of the city part of an age-old anti-urban

4、 Confucian thinking. His ambivalent attitude towards modernity also betrays a sense of loss in terms of his historical position regarding how to understand fundamental changes of his time as epitomized by the city. Nevertheless, Shens urban ction has registered the initial efforts in modern Chinese

5、literature in coming 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 (19021988) is one of the most important novelists in modern Chinese literature. Productive an

6、d 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 inclu

7、des 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 Hunananidyllic country both real and imaginativewith its local avors, aboriginal customs, picturesque landscape

8、, extraordinary lifestyles, festive conventions, linguistic codes, and most of all, its colorful and rustic gures possessing divine quality (Wang 1992, p. 256), virility and moral purity. His rural writings also demonstrate a profound lyrical quality and poetic sensibility that are highly treasured

9、in the Chinese literary creation. He is often regarded as a forefather of root-seeking or native-soil literature in China.Critics tend to focus on his writings on West Hunan, that is, his rural writings, as if they were most representative. However, Shen Congwen has written almost as much on urban t

10、hemes; in fact his urban ction constitutes about half of his complete works, which is very unique among modern Chinese writers. Admittedly, his urban ctions are not as imaginative and poetic as his rural ctions, and the urban scenes depicted are not as fascinating and exotic as his beloved West Huna

11、n. In contrast to his rural writings, his urban ctions also lack the kind of aura possessed by his rural works, and are banal and formulaic in their representation of an urban world lled with physically and psychologically distorted and spiritually impotent men and women. Yet, it is the opposition b

12、etween the rural and urban that informs his understanding and representing both the city and the rural. His representation of rural folks and pastoral sceneries expresses his moral idealism. Shen eulogizes the healthy and elegant way of life and humane and harmonious relationship among rural people

13、in contrast to the urban world represented as the Other of his utopian West Hunancorrupted and decadent. Shen himself repeatedly emphasizes that he is essentially a country man, and that it is from the rural perspective that he observes and evaluates urban society and its people. Ironically, however

14、, it is exactly the modern cultural/existentialcondition epitomized by the fallen city that makes 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 H

15、unan derives its meaning and moral authority by contrast with temporal urban culture. The irony also lies at the personal level of Shens 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 underst

16、anding 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 betwee

17、n his rural and urban perspectives: he can only re-imagine and re-present the idyllic when living away in urban spaceit is a modern sensibility and milieu that inform his rural imagining; nevertheless, he critiques the city from his imagined pastoral idealism.This essay examines selected urban ction

18、s of Shen Congwen in the literary contexts of his native-soil ction and contemporary urban ction by the Shanghai school, and argues that that there exist contradictory impulses in Shens representation of the city. The coexistence of denial and control can be seen in the absence of urban geographic a

19、nd 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 forcethe lack of natural virility in both men and women of the citythe root cause for their moral degeneration. Thus in contrast to the natural enviro

20、nment in his rural writings, the urban interiority stands for emasculating pressure and devitalizing effects of the urban life. Nevertheless, Shens 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 ruralurban continuum that charac

21、terizes traditional Chinese urbanrural space. This ambivalent space somehow renders his urban critique less focused on modernity per se than on the transitional city that encompasses both traditional and modern features. On the other hand, if there exists a deep melancholy in his gentle and poetic w

22、ritings 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 poses to traditional moral values and individual identity, as well as perplexities about urban eligibility. Shens rural

23、idealism is partly 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 representation of the pastoral and his melancholy at its impending loss can only be produced, perceived an

24、d felt by a sophisticatedmodern sensibility.City as interiorityShens urban ction exhibits a strong anti-urban bias, and is virtually the negative Other of his rural writing on West Hunan. In general, his ction translates the dichotomy of country and city in moral terms of good and evil. Criticism te

25、nds to examine this dichotomy mainly in terms of characterization and family and love relationships. For instance, most urbanites in Shens ctions 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 tu

26、berculoses, mental disorder, insomnia, and weak nerves. For instance, in the short storySansan, the urban youth who visits the countryside has a pale white face, is dressed in white, and suffers from the advanced stage of tuberculoses. As one of his rural characters in Sansan comments, Who can be su

27、re of all those names for diseases city folk have? If you ask me, city people like to get sickthats why they have all those names for diseases. Out here we cant stop working just on account of illness, so apart from malaria we just get fevers and the runs. All those diseases with the fancy names hav

28、ent ever come to the countryside (Kinkley 2004, p. 140). Thus in Portraits of Eight Steeds (Shen 2002c,Vol. 8, pp. 197225), the university professors suffer either insomnia or dysfunctional kidney, while in A Gentlemans Wife (Shen 2002a, Vol. 6, pp. 213242), the husband is paralyzed and sexually imp

29、otent.To Shen, what is fundamentally lacking in the urbanites is the life force. These people cannot transcend their trivial and quotidian living, and their senses are dulled by their immediate material gains and interests. Physical weakness is only an outward manifestation of psychological and spir

30、itual lassitude of the city people, especially those who lived the life of a scholar or intellectual. Most of them were lazy, overcautious, stingy, and meanwhile malnourished and without sufcient sleep and fertility (Shen 1998, p. 240).Their moral degeneration and cultural decadence are specically r

31、eected 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 com

32、modity 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. Aft

33、er going through all kinds of bitter experiencesas a prostitute and concubine, she suffers deep sorrow and fear. She nally gains the true love of an ofcer who is young, honest, and perfect just as her beauty and youth are fading. In order to possess him completely and hold him permanently, she poiso

34、ns and blinds him secretly. In The Gentry Wife, the family relationship is built on cheating, adultery, and hypocrisy. The husband and wife only maintain a supercial familial fac ade, while each is engaged in a secret adultery, and the son and the concubine have an incestuous relationship. Eventuall

35、y it is women who lose in the love games (Shen 2002b, Vol. 7, pp. 169193). In exploring urban life, Shens ctions 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

36、can only aspire for romantic love but are rarely able to realize this love in marriage because of poverty. Guo Moruo summarizes the situation succinctly: the ideal cannot be realized, and the realized is not ideal (qtd. in Han 1994, p. 161). It is the pains and despairs of unfullled sexual desires a

37、nd romantic longings of some of his urban characters that Shen characterizes urban culture as especially morbid and suppressive.Of course, critics are not wrongly directed in their reading of Shens critique of urban culture from the angle of family and love relationships. In fact most of Shens urban

38、 representation concentrates on these aspects of the society, and his urban ctions were once even labeled as pink works (Han 1994, p. 157). There is no doubt that Shens urban ction depicts much the morbid social and human landscapes in the 20s and 30s urban China as family is the microcosm of the so

39、ciety. Nevertheless, an exclusive critical focus on characters and love/family relationships misses other aspects of Shens urban ction, namely the representation of the city itself. To a large extent, Shen is interested in the interiority of urban life. He rarely describes physical contour of urban

40、space, and even the interior space lacks detailed depiction. This absence of urban space and focus on interiority certainly foregrounds human relations and characterization. Indeed, living encapsulated and enervated lives, these characters are forced to deal only with one another. As a result, Shens

41、 urban ction 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 representation reects his limited vision and perspective on the city a

42、nd 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 Shens time could be both perplexing and threatening, and cause anxieties, fears and loss of identity

43、 to an outsider from the rural area. To write the city, to render it as a knowable, legible and controllable presence is thus a way to alleviate these anxieties and fears so as to reclaim the authors identity and subjectivity. Perhaps what most distinguishes Shens rural writings from his urban ones

44、is his visual perception and representation. His West Hunan writings are marked by an ambition to visualize the whole countryside of West Hunan. We nd that his scenic description occupies a large space in his rural ction. It is lengthy and detailed, and often reinforced by minute records of local cu

45、stoms 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 naturethe harmonious blending of mountains, river, clouds and rains with mills, boats, ports, dragon boats, little village

46、s, animals, and most of all, humansthat constitutes the landscape of his countryside. The following description is from his most famous rural ction, 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

47、 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 see the small pebbles and rocks thirty or forty feet below the surface of

48、 the water, and when the sun is shining you can even watch the shes gliding in these parts as owering cornelians. The shes seem to be oating in the air. And all along the banks there are great mountains shrouded in slender bamboos, used for making paper; and though the seasons change, the bamboos re

49、main a deep, penetrating and vivid greed. The houses near the river are surrounded with peach and apricot groves, so that in spring wherever there were peach-blossoms there were also houses, and wherever there were houses there was wine. You saw the houses by noticing the purple-colored clothes which were hung