「探求者」作家群文學困境論---- 一個「右派」作家群的歷史、社會與美學考察

Abstract

The “Explorers” is a term referring to a group of writers and their literary magazines that appeared during the period of 1956-1957. They are important writers belonging to the “rightist” group of writers in China Mainland. The main focus of this thesis is a case study of the works of these writers. The analysis also combines social historical and aesthetics approaches to explore how the “reception” relationships between the “rightist” generation of writers and the Soviet social-realism, critical realism, the tradition of classical Chinese colloquial fiction, and the literary thoughts of Mao Zedong. The writers’ dilemmas caused by these elements on their writing methods, world views and social experiences are discussed. The life-long view of literature of the “Explorers” are grounded in the theory of enlightenment promoted by the intellectual of the May Fourth Movement and the people-oriented literature stressed by Mao Zedong in his “Yanan Talk on Literature”. The main directions and themes of their writings are based on these two principles. During the 1950s, part of the social realism was their main doctrine for writing which was effectively limiting the space and depth of their exploration. After 1976 when China first started to relax relatively the freedom of writing, the “explorers” liberated themselves to write all aspects of life by practicing all kinds of literary techniques and principles. During the period of 1978-1984, the “explorers” and other representative “rightist” writers produced many high quality works with literary merits. However, when the door of China opened widely to the world after 1985, the “explorers”, who were limited by their old literary theory and world views, began to decline. Being obsessed with pragmatic literary thinking, they were too conservative to compete with the new generation of writers who dared to experiment with new forms of writing. The “rightist” writers and their works were mainly studied in terms of “Literature of the wounds”, “literature of change” and “literature of searching the past” in the past. The present study attempts to develop a new approach to understand and analyze all aspects of the “rightist” writers and their works. This model of approach also can be applied to the study of the dilemma of the development of literature and society of Taiwan, China Mainland and the “third world countries”.