earticle

영어

The evaluation of writing of Shen Congwen in the history of modern and contemporary literature that has been made so far significantly attributes to A History of Modern Chinese Fiction of Hsia Chih-tsing. When approaching the writing of Shen Congwen, the literary history described by Hsia Chih-tsing put emphasis on the de-historical or de-political context. However, this evaluation overlooked practice of “de-politicizing political nature” regarding the literary situation of the 1930s in which the writing of Shen Congwen represented of the time. This study judges that the de-political inclinations in the text of Shen Congwen not only existed as personal preference/taste, writing of memory or narrative of emotion, but also were a sort of choice of the era of excessive political nature and results of practice. The writing of Shen Congwen evidently consists of de-political context created as a product of collision with the mainstream of the time. Therefore, this study views that Shen’s writing was a practice including substantial political nature from the context of literary history despite the presence of de-political nature in the content of his writing. The work of Hsia Chih-tsing has ambivalence in the meaning. Without doubt, Shen’s writing techniques using impressionism-based narrative technique and operation of irony showed a new possibility while creating some extent of separation from the literary situation of the time. In this sense, it is true that Shen’s writing formed multiple narrative plots in the history of literature. Nonetheless, through independence or resistance from/against the existing values of literary history, in particular, considering that the literary world of the time was going through the age of excessive political nature, it is required to give new meaning in the evaluation of this impressionist techniques and irony from the perspective of denying and overcoming it. This study does not refute the fact that Shen’s achievement is remarkable in this new evaluation, in other words, in the evaluation of fragmentary literary aesthetics or the aesthetic analysis limited to the interiority of text. However, this study intends to verify that the evaluation can be different in the context possessed by his text, in other words, the context of literary history. This study interprets that Shen’s narrative of impressionist techniques and irony-based writing created between individuals and society by making a contrast between a city and the rural area pursue aesthetic completion inside the text, but his writing demonstrates the typical aspect of “de-politicized” political narrative in the macrocontext of the Chinese literary history of the 1930s. According to this study’s analysis, for Shen Congwen, the realist writing reflecting contradictions in the reality to the fullest and nationalist writing portraying maximization of inner and outer contradictions of the nation as literature with excessive politics were the repression mechanism of political nature against literature. Challenging against this phenomenon, it seems that Shen was seeking alternative writing as a new mimesis by using impressionist narrative or literary irony.