Abstract
To compare China's New Cultural Movement to Europe's Renaissance aims at finding a totalizing Chinese form of "speech/writing" that may be equivalent to the Western counterpart, and the way to achieve it is to build on the transformation of language from classical Chinese to vernacular as a breakthrough. However, the long-established "lyrical" tradition in Chinese literature and the genre system which orthodoxizes poetry have no capacity to endow a spiritual form that can correspond to the narrative of the modern. The Vernacular Poetry fails to extend the tradition of poeticization in Chinese literature and to appropriate the specific truth-pursuing function in foreign modern poetry, which leads to the eventual decline of the poeticness of Chinese literature. On the other hand, the vernacular belles-lettres, inspired by the late Ming Dynasty essays and European essays, provides a feasible path to "con-formation" for modern literature, with which the "poetic" tradition of Chinese literature has been renewed and reconstructed.
First Page
57
Last Page
63
Recommended Citation
He, Changsheng. 2019. "The Decline and Reconstruction of "Poetic" Text in Chinese "Renaissance"." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 39, (2): pp.57-63. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol39/iss2/15
