When the dust settles, look back at the creation and criticism of this period, clarify the complicated relationship between "personalized" writing and "private" writing, investigate the psychological mechanism behind equating or naming "female writing" as "private" writing, reveal the confusion of critics about their background and historical precipitation during the interchangeable use of these words, and take this opportunity to think about their China literature.
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Since the new period, with the relative prosperity of literary creation, critical discourse has become more active and rich. A remarkable performance is that people keep naming literary creation: scar literature, reflection literature, root-seeking literature, reform literature, new realism and so on. But up to now, people still don't use the two critical terms of "personalization" and "personalized" writing on a unified cognitive level, as they did when facing the previous concepts. Investigating their background and usage context is the first problem to be solved to clarify "personalization" and "personalization" writing, and under what circumstances it is related to "female writing".
The traditional society in China is based on groups, and the values attach importance to the country, the nation, the class and the collective, and the individual life attached to it is suppressed to some extent. During the May 4th Movement, with the emancipation of the mind, people and personality, the proposition of "human literature" made the focus of literature shift from the grand field of society, times, country, nation and class to the expression of life and humanity. Since the 1930s, national salvation has overwhelmed enlightenment, and the country and nation have once again replaced people and life, becoming the preferred theme of literature. Subsequently, national independence, civil revolutionary war, national construction, class struggle and so on. , has repeatedly become the mainstream discourse, overshadowing other voices. It was not until the 1980s that the new ideological emancipation movement brought about the liberation of human beings and humanity. Slogans such as "literary subjectivity" and "turning inward" put forward in the 1980s are precisely the response of literature to this call.
Mr. Chen Sihe used the word "* * * name" to summarize such a situation: when the era contains a major and unified theme, the material for intellectuals to think and explore problems comes from the theme of this era, and individual independence is concealed under the theme of this era. [1] Literary creation in the 1980s was what he called "* * * names". This view and the French postmodern philosopher Lyotard's "grand narrative" (grand
Narrative). Lyotard believes that there is a dominant narrative in any era, and this mainstream narrative is "grand narrative" or "meta-narrative". Trauma literature, reflection literature, reform literature, root-seeking literature, etc. , are all important propositions about the times, countries, nationalities, etc. for a period of time, which naturally became the main theme at that time. This is the "great narrative" of literature in the 1980s. In this case, "the consistent theme and similar expression make the literary creation at that time look more like a collective behavior, and the writer's personality is not obvious in the text." [2]
In the 1990s, with the social and political transformation in China, the integrated social organization structure was broken by the market economy system, and its integration function tended to weaken after the ideological loosening, and the traditional political culture and social order in China changed greatly. The western ideological trend that began to pour in in the 1980s questioned the long-standing ideological and cultural pattern of "great unification" from another direction, and the situation of diversified values emerged. "The great and unified theme of the times is often unable to approach the spiritual trend of the nation", and no matter what kind of voice, it just "reflects a part of the theme of the times". Chen Sihe named this cultural phenomenon with diverse themes "nameless", which is basically what Lyotard meant by "tiny narrative". Lyotard believes that there are many "micro-narratives" besides "grand narratives", which are separated from each other. Generally, the "grand narrative" regards itself as "orthodoxy" and the "minor narrative" as "heresy" to be rejected and belittled. When "grand narrative" is widely questioned by the public, "tiny narrative" replaces the original "grand narrative". Lyotard believes that society and human nature are diverse and have no universality. The biggest mistake of modern thinkers is to obliterate differences and heterogeneity, while Lyotard thinks that what is really creative is the vivid "tiny narrative". Without its free development, there will be no prosperity of science and culture. [3]
"Personalized" writing just appeared at the moment when "grand narrative" was questioned and the era of "* * * name" came to an end. The appearance of Wang Shuo and his "* * * voice" among readers have a certain impetus to "personalized" writing. His creation shows "subversion of classical ideology" from content to form. [4] Most importantly, he deconstructed Cao Pi's concept of taking literature as a "great cause of statecraft and an immortal event" and the sacredness it gave to writing, freeing literature from the shackles of "liberating politics" and "speculative philosophy". Writers who broke free from the social and political discourse system began to speak as subjects with unique personality. "The aesthetic hegemony of historical narrative based on * * * and imagination" [5] The scenery is no longer, and the literature that retreats to the edge is no longer adhering to the spirit of "enlightenment". Wang Shuo's slogan of "avoiding the sublime" is a typical reflection of this change. The theme of literary works has shifted from the "grand" vision of social history and politics to personal daily life, and "new realism" has emerged. As the follow-up of "new realism", "personalized" writing is essentially a rebellion against mainstream ideology, which requires literature to be closer to itself rather than obsessed with politics and ideology, and closer to metaphysical daily life rather than metaphysical country, nation and times.
It is easier to understand the background of "personalized" writing, and then talk about other things. Because "personalized" writing contains many meanings, it is not surprising that there is confusion when users only extract one pulse from their own topic. When talking about "female literature" and "individuality" with Wang Gan, Ms. Dai Jinhua defined "individuality" from three aspects: one is personality style, and the other is personal views and angles. The third is devoted to "female writing". This is a more comprehensive and pertinent combing of "personalization". Dai Jinhua glimpsed the function of "personalized" writing: "A narrative with a rather personalized viewpoint and angle may constitute a digestion and subversion of authoritative discourse and mainstream narrative, or at least become a crack in a complete imagination." [6] This is the most breakthrough aspect of personalized writing. It attaches great importance to individual value, which makes the individual life and daily life experience that have been abandoned for a long time outside the "grand narrative" enter the room, and the discourse crack opened by its subversion of "collectivization and publicity" [7] makes marginal women's writing flourish as an independent and special landscape in contemporary literary world.
American feminist Barbara (Barbara)
Johnson once revealed that there seems to be a natural connection between women and "individuality". For a long time, women's personal experience has not only been excluded from the knowledge category, but anything belonging to the personal category has been devalued after adding a "female" code. In her view, personal position, or at least personal position, is a common way to spread authority and decompose the wrong patriarchal meaning. Feminism re-emphasizes the personal influence on women's literary creation. Because the process of women from silence to awakening is inevitably a personalized process, it naturally becomes the theme of literature and needs to be respected and affirmed. The role of feminist literary criticism in this respect is to put personal, especially female, experience in a real position. [8] In this "personalized" writing wave, female writers write with personal life as the main body, showing "the survival and experience of women who are constantly obscured by male discourse or always ignored by male narrative in history and reality." [9] The works they created, with strong subjective color, became the spiritual autobiography of women. The direct writing of women's personal life experiences by female writers not only changed the "empty" expression of women in male narratives in the past, but also subverted the female image preset by men in reality, which constituted the deconstruction of the patriarchal society and its moral discourse. Their writing cracked the "grand narrative" and produced a shocking effect. [10] became the acme of "personalized" writing. In this sense, "personalized" writing without special gender significance is confused with female writing.
Women's writing with strong rebellious psychology, like a bright lamp, illuminates the "dark continent" of women's life and makes women's real life experience "surface of history". "Witches" and their "private lives" have greatly shocked the literary world and challenged the reading experience and critical discourse formed by the male-centered society. Their "inability to grasp the details of women's lifestyles" [1 1] has alarmed conservative critics. When talking about their works, "personalized" writing has been replaced by "personal" writing. From "personalized" writing to "personal" writing, the word "difference", as the exclusive and pronoun of "female writing", reveals many cultural symbols in the complicated clouds. For example, many comments on Chen Ran, a representative of "private" writing, focus on "the privacy in her works and women's sexual privacy" with realistic moral concepts, and turn a blind eye to her thinking, turning her self-awareness of self-combing on the philosophical level into "peeping at others", and all rational efforts are in vain. In this way, it is easy for them to put women under their own views, and they are not at the same level. Not only can hostile forces not be formed, but even simple and equal dialogue objectification relations cannot be formed. This is the best way for male-dominated society to exclude smart women. " [ 12]
The so-called "private narrative" in the title of this paper refers to the "private" writing/"personalized" writing used by critics only within the scope of women's writing at that time.
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Summarizing the context of "private" writing contains such a sense of identity: avoiding mainstream discourse, focusing on the experience of self-private life, and creating autobiographical works (with female life or spirit) with delicate brushwork.
In the 1920s, influenced by Japanese "my novels", Yu Dafu's works were classified as "private novels" or "self-novels". In China culture, which attaches importance to collectivity, publicity, egoism and openness, the word "private" containing individuality, privacy, egoism and secrecy is often negative. At first, the "self-exposure" in his novels was severely criticized, but people soon found a reason to excuse him from the novels. It is believed that his description of "sexual distress" is not only a personal life experience, but also related to the hero's patriotism and anti-imperialist feelings, and the social significance of his works cannot be denied because of his descriptive nature. The works express people's introspection and the struggle and struggle of the soul. The protagonist feels the pain of life from the hard-to-get-rid depression, and tries to explore the value of human beings and the meaning of life from this pain. Yu Dafu's far-fetched attachment to the "country" when expressing the anguish of "sex" caused a rift in the narrative. Critics, on the other hand, used the words "country" and "nation" to make Yu Dafu get rid of the condescension of the word "private" and think whimsically. However, this just exposes the inferior position of individual "sex" in culture. From Yu Dafu's description of "sex" to the grand topic of "hiding shame" and the frank expression of "sex" in "private" writing, we can see the variation of the times. However, when the same content appears in the works of female writers, the criticism is limited to moral condemnation, which shows "the innate deficiency of this culture" [13].
Women writers such as Chen Ran, Lin Bai and Hai Nan are regarded as "private", and their works tend to describe women's individual life and inner experience, focusing on finding and locating their "self" identity. Different from the previous female writers who expressed women's feelings under the background of powerful social ideals or social problems, they did not write about women from the perspective of "grandeur" and "vastness" of society, nation, country and times, but expressed women's psychological feelings and physical experiences from the microscopic field of the relationship between men and women, bringing literature to the microscopic world. Therefore, they are all "private" and they are different from Yu Dafu's "private novels". Commentators have evaluated the difference between Yu Dafu's writing and women's "private" writing from the narrative space, and think that Yu Dafu's own feelings are not an independent and self-sufficient closed space, but are linked with his concern for the fate of the country and the nation, and his "private" is still in contact with the outside world. [14] In Chen Ran's view, narrative space is closed. This can be seen from the spatial images such as "room", "bathroom" and "curtain" (separated from the outside world) that often appear in their works. In Chen Ran's Toast to the Past, historical imprints such as "Nixon's visit to China" and "striving for private practice" are just the background of gloomy vanity, or just the scaffolding used by Chen Ran to build his own spiritual hall. The work presents the heroine's personal survival experience and psychological behavior. [ 15]