Critiquing the city, envision-ning the country Shen Congwen’s urban fction-外文文献及译文.doc

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 November 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 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 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 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 and 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 includes 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, 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 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 themes; 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 Hunan. 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 between 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 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, 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 Hunan 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 understanding 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 between 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 ctions 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 and 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 environment 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 characterizes 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 writings 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 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 and 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 tends 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 tuberculoses, 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 sure 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 havent 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 impotent.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 spiritual 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 reected 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 commodity 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. After 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 poisons 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. Eventually 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 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 and 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 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 society. 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 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 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 and 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 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 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 customs 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 villages, 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 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 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 remain 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 out to dry. But when autumn and winter came, the houses stood out against the cliffs and along the riverside, and you would see them shining clear in the distance with their yellow mud walls and black roof-tiles, and they were all perfectly placed in harmony with their surroundings. Travelers who loved poetry or painting would crouch low in the boat for the whole of the thirty day voyage upstream, never tiring of the splendors which Nature continually unfolded to his gaze. There were miracles everywhere, and Nature was never more charming and captivating than along the rivers of Szechuan and Hunan (Ti and Payne 1982, p. 195).Here the authors search for a visual countryside is very much within the aesthetics of traditional Chinese landscape paintingshumans are within nature, and nature includes humans. Unlike the anthropomorphized nature in Song Dynastys landscape paintings where tiny human gures are only decorations of nature however, it is humans that dominate Shens rural landscape. Shens rural landscape does not stop here with the idyllic; it also includes the hustling and bustling life in the streets of the rural town:Although the city was so eminently quiet and peaceful, River Road was rather an exception to the general order, for it was there that the traders sought out their contracts with the merchants from East Szechuan. There were hotels and lodging-houses for the merchants, and barber-shops which were real shops, not just wandering chairs. There were restaurants, haberdashers grocery stores, oil shops, salters, clothing shops. There were shops where you could buy hard-wood pulleys, bamboo rope, pots and pans and kettles for the passing ships, and there were also brokers who acted as employment agents for the seamen (p. 197)The extended description of the rural landscape, busy street life as well as local history constitutes a geographical synthesis (Kort 2004, p. 15), providing the place with a particular unity, atmosphere and environment. This language of place also serves to halt the temporal ow of the narrative within the story so as to create a sense of timelessness. Time does not so much stop as it indicates an eternal being. The absence of temporal markers of chronological dates further draws this world away from a real historical framework and thus reinforces its selfcontainedness. In general, it is through spatialization of time that Shen has created the self-contained utopian world of West Hunan. Nevertheless, what characterize this panoramic view of rural landscape are not just the spatialized time but also the movement and temporal ow within. The fragmentary nature of street life does not contradict the sense of spatialized time underlying the larger timeless world, for the focus on exterior space only stops time at the macro level, but not at the micro level, thus creating a harmony between movement and stasis, between temporal change and a timeless world. This spatiotemporal harmony becomes the ch