Chinese Modernism Analysis

We enter now a new phase of our discussion. We will start dealing with the literary expression of Chinese modernity, modernism and postmodernism, as to say the literary production after 1976. The last 30 years of Chinese literature is a labyrinth impossible to solve, just in the 80’s China had more than 300 literary journals, therefore we will proceed isolating those that for better or worse are the most representative expressions of Chinese contemporaneity. The New Era is a progressive literary achievement that sees in Scar and Roots Searching Literature the pillars to stand on. Slowly existentialist considerations interrupted the linearity of realism, stream of consciousness stained the dullness of chronology. As we understand the literary

As we have seen the origin of the tension in the Western hemisphere is a crisis of consciousness due to individual uneasiness before a society historically changing, the downfall of positivism and the madness of war forced European intelligentsia to review values and scientific conclusions. Inverse is the Chinese happenings, the bulk of modernism and therefore the origin of tension is the collective experience, a common life experience before the material and cultural grip of the State. And the target of the critical plead is not the bourgeois milieu but the Party-State called to rationalize a version of Post Mao

As strange as it might seem, the starting point to understand Chinese literary production in the 80s is the Yanan Talks on Literature and Art dated 1942. Mao laid out the regulation for the control of literati under the regime: by saying that literature should serve politic he didn’t say anything different from what China had expressed for centuries, the synonymy of art with morality and politics. Chinese literature always moved between humanism and national salvation, giving to the latter a moral preference. May Fourth in this sense is to be visualized as an exception focused briefly on self-realization, exploration of love and sexuality, young characters needing to break the bounds of a conservative society. Before and after May Fourth Chinese literature has had a collective character. The concern of the intellectuals was on the society as whole, social inequities, class-consciousness, sense of collectivity. With the end of the civil war, the coming of age of Maoism called people to build the socialist state, immediately any residual of enlightens humanism naturally faded away. Mao understood literature and art as a weapon in the revolutionary struggle therefore advocated socialist realism, styled borrowed from Communist Russia, based on communist utopia and class struggle. Soon after the establishment of the CCP the artistic radicalism