Editor's Note
20 years have passed in the 21st century. In the past 20 years, we have increasingly used "high speed", "acceleration", "dramatic", "sudden change", "innovation" and "variety" to describe changes in the world and life. The same is true of literature. Profound changes have taken place in terms of creative ideas, categories, themes, styles, and groups, including literature and life, literature and readers, technology, media, and the relationship between the market and so on. How to recognize and understand These changes are of great significance for us to summarize the past and think about the future. To this end, China Writers.com has specially launched a series of special topics "Twenty Years of Literature in the 21st Century" to make a relatively systematic review of the literature of the past 20 years.
We hope that this topic is as open and inclusive as possible. We can not only see the macro-scanning and theoretical analysis of literature in the 20 years of the new century, but also review the phenomena or events presented in the form of "keywords"; Overall description, but also in-depth specific research fields; not only can you have a glimpse of the generation, change and establishment of the internal quality of literary works in the past 20 years, but also analyze the interaction and symbiosis of external factors such as cultural trends, market media and literature; both self-organization and observation The other, which extends from Chinese contemporary literature to overseas Chinese literature and world literature, presents the era of accelerated globalization and the mutual influence, similarities and differences between world literature.
From the perspective of literary history, 20 years of literature may be a little short, and it is difficult to reach a conclusion and make a positioning. However, these timely summaries are very necessary in the process of literature progress. It is a retrospective, and it points to the future.
(China Writers.com planned "20 Years of Literature in the 21st Century" special articles have been launched, please pay attention)
"20 Years of Literature in the 21st Century" the thirteenth series:
20 Years of Literature in the 21st Century
Changes in the Media Since the New Century For those born in the 1980s and before, the "new century" used to be an infinitely promising future. Twenty years have passed since the future became a reality, and one-fifth of a century is enough to test how far our dreams of the new century have come true. 17K Novel Online has a novel called "Beautiful New Century" (authored by Navy Love Dudu), the website's introduction to the content of the work reads: "Everything is beautiful, life is beautiful, love is beautiful , work is good, as long as your heart is good, everything is good!" This work began serialization in 2018, using the characters' memories to tell the experience before and after entering the new century. Interestingly, the first chapter of this novel is titled "WeChat", which tells the story of a business manager named Pan Xin, whose WeChat group suddenly became lively. Messages from former classmates reminded him of his past life. We noticed that the medium through which this novel leads the story is WeChat, which was born in the second decade of the new century and is an online chat program that can be run on mobile terminals. An essential tool for communication, digital media, as written in novels, can still help human beings to salvage submerged memories, just like the memory cells of the human brain and traditional media such as books, newspapers, and television.
We already know that the "daydream" imagination is an important source of the attraction of online novel reading. With the help of the substituting sense of characters, readers' dreams that cannot be fulfilled in real life can be realized in the fictional world of novels, bringing reading Pleasure and make up for the shortcomings of life. The rise and development of online literature in China coincided with the ten years before and after the turn of the old and the new century. When they describe and define the present and future life like "Beautiful New Century", they are in line with the public's psychological expectations for real life. Fitted together, the two are an isomorphic relationship in a broad sense. Therefore, from this perspective, Internet literature and art with Internet literature as the main body are closely related to social narrative, and become a barometer for observing social emotions and fashion trends. The great practice of reform and opening up has ushered in a new historical stage. Before entering the new century, China began to transition from "standing up" to "getting rich", and the sign of "getting rich" is the improvement of spending power with money in the pocket. , which directly contributed to the formation of a consumer society - literature that aesthetically and visualized memory, emotion and imagination in the form of words, was pushed to the entrance of the shopping mall. If we acknowledge the limiting work of human life itself that is crucial to literatureIf you use it, then this change is very important—the consumption concept has dispelled traditional values. Literature that was once "black and white" is like a fireworks after being lit, and it begins to show unpredictable changes in possibility. This kind of change has already aroused the lament of the society in the 1990s, but compared with the changes in literary creation, production and dissemination brought about by the media reform characterized by the popularization of the Internet since the new century, it is only a magical stage. A corner of the curtain just opened.
In the 20th year of the new century, under the torrent of media revolution, literature has been transferred and transformed from the temple to the folk, from the elite to the public, from the field of thought to the field of entertainment, and from the creation of the soul to the creation of craftsmanship; More causally than at any time in history, the evolution of media has transformed not only the dissemination of literature, but also its creation and production, including narrative and rhetoric, as well as internal changes in texts. There is no doubt that the new media has become one of the main forces to reconstruct the literary scene of the new era.
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"The first decade of the new century is not a natural concept of time, but a decade in which a major 'change' occurs. This 'change' occurs simultaneously at the three levels of literary media, literary standards and literary institutions ..." (Shao Yanjun, "Research on Novels in the First Decade of the New Century") Literary media is listed in the first level of "changes", indicating that after entering the new century, the media will become the basis for leading and observing literary changes. elements. From the cramped interior space of literature and entering into the broad social and cultural life, we can know that the digital revolution of the media is the lever that drives the changes in literature.
It is necessary for us to review the history of the Chinese Internet and observe how the Internet has changed from a medium tool to a cultural environment for our existence and a force to reshape literature. At the turn of the century, the computer "Millennium Bug" once became a hot topic. When the bell at the end of the century rang, many people were waiting for the big event with strange excitement, but the harm caused by the bug in the computer software It is not as big as expected - this is of course due to the stability of the program itself, and more importantly, in 1999 before the arrival of the new century, there were only 1.46 million computers connected to the Internet in China, of which 25 were connected to the Internet through dedicated lines. 10,000 units and another 1.21 million units are dial-up Internet access. The total number of netizens in China is only 4 million. The Internet as a medium is still mainly used as a tool. It is far from the level of changing the social environment as a cultural subject. to have a substantial impact on society as a whole. In 2000, the WAP wireless network protocol based on 2G mobile technology began to be promoted, and China Mobile's "Monternet" business was fully rolled out. The mobile Internet has lingered on this simple application for ten years. In 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology issued 3G licenses to the three major operators, which opened a new era of China's mobile Internet; ten years later, 5G began to enter social applications, and a new era of the network has arrived. As of March 2020, China's Internet penetration rate has reached 64.5%, and the total number of netizens is 904 million. The popularity of the Internet along with smartphones has not only changed the living habits of human beings, but also rebuilt the living environment. Internet access has become like eating and sleeping. The physiological needs of people have even become a necessity like the air that is breathed at any time but cannot be felt. It is difficult for us to live without the Internet. The Internet has created a "second reality world" that is parallel to reality. Internet access is not only a purposeful and instrumental behavior, but also the behavior itself and the process of people's activities on the Internet. Spiritualized, the web has begun to redefine human and social life. The media function of the
network reinforces an important assertion in communication: existence is information, and the medium is information, so the medium is existence. "Without the existential realm generated by media, other elements of literature cannot form a harmonious and integrated existential relationship, and it is difficult for literature to become a place to show the meaning of existence." (Shan Xiaoxi, "Media and Literature") Entering the new century, the Internet highlights the media As a special function of literary existence. We don’t need to be too obsessed with the philosophical meaning of “existence”, but it seems that we can borrow the literal meaning of “existence” literally, that is, literature must always be generated and exist through the medium. Without the medium, literature does not know where it is. The existence of the medium as a form of literature did not begin in the Internet age. Literature must be produced and maintained through the medium from the moment of its birth. The golden label of "art" to the text style and writing method is only the result of later theorizing. , in fact they are only that way because of different mediums: there are multiple versions of the same myth and folklore because in theIn the era of no recording equipment, oral narration could not be fixed, so Zhu Guangqian said that folk songs live in oral form. It is impossible for a novel to appear in the era of tortoise shell, bronze, bamboo and silk. It is unrealistic to use primitive tools to engrave "A Dream of Red Mansions" on a small tortoise shell, so the words on the oracle bone inscriptions can only be It is that style. Why is the novel we see now in this form? Many researchers attribute it to the increase in the complexity of social life, so the capacity of novels has become larger. This is good, but intuitively, another more direct reason is that the capacity of physical books has become larger after the development of printing technology. Physical limitations and rhetorical skills have jointly created a special stylistic form, which in turn affects the internal structure and attraction. Readers, expressions that facilitate the flow of the work, and thus develop systematic literary laws. The length of online literature is too long. The main reason is to keep the story from ending to maintain the stickiness of fans. However, the digital network carrier space without weight and unlimited capacity makes it possible. One of the examples is that the limited logic of the objective real world has been unable to fill the boundless cyberspace, and literature can only be filled with the imagination of other worlds, different time and space, and supernatural powers.
In the agricultural and industrial age, media was a scarce resource, which limited the popularity of literary reading and creation. It was not until the beginning of the new century that the popularization of literature really achieved practical results and reached an unprecedented peak after 20 years. Among them, the low cost and convenient and fast application of network media played an important basic guarantee role.
With the deepening of the media revolution, the affirmative effect of the Internet will cause the traditional elite literature to lose its exclusive media resource advantage. In terms of the number of readers, the question of who is the mainstream in the first decade of the new century is in the second The decade ends without controversy. More importantly, the readers of online literature are not all snatched from traditional literature, and most of them are attracted from the public - these readers do not necessarily read literary journals before they stop reading online novels. Habits are absolute increments among literary readers. Therefore, it is foreseeable that, subject to the national traditional aesthetic habits that have been internalized into collective unconsciousness, although the average education level of social members continues to increase, with the intergenerational changes of writers and readers, the masses who continue the context of traditional popular literature Literature will receive more attention, popular novels and serious literature in the sense of new literature since the "May Fourth" will merge at a partial level, and literature as an ideology and a way of expressing human universality will be redefined. A process has already begun in the first decade of the new century.
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The influence of media reform on literature in the new century is not only reflected in the rise of online literature, but traditional literature is also faced with a serious "encounter" - the reason why it is called "encounter" is to stand in the Chinese modern and contemporary era. In the 100-year history of literature, serious literary writing based on the new aesthetic expression of literature since the "May Fourth" has experienced multiple changes that have never been seen before, and these changes are almost certainly related to the media.
The literary craze in the 1980s met with a cold in the 1990s, the number of literary readers shrank sharply, and the society aroused the voice of "literature being marginalized". On the surface, it seems that idealism has declined because of the value orientation of pursuing economic interests, and people are too busy to earn money to read. However, from the perspective of media communication, the reason for the coldness of literature is that the original readers were replaced by new ones. Media diverted, and new readers opted for other cultural lifestyles. Mainly due to the popularity of television, followed by video halls, game halls and dance halls all over the streets, people no longer regard reading literary works as the main way to entertain, seek knowledge, expand their horizons and gain fresh experience. The entertainment function of literature is not as good as images and physical actions that escape the scene of life, which can bring more stimulation and enjoyment to the senses. Moreover, the mainstream serious literature at that time just pursued the pursuit of seriousness such as solemnity and sublime. The inevitable result of media change. The
journal was once the most important media carrier of literature, and a weather vane for observing the changing tides of literature. Before the birth of online literature, the current literature was disseminated to readers through periodicals. In 2011, a number of media published an article saying: "Since the 1990s, the circulation of all domestic literary publications has dropped sharply. Reaching millions of copies, "Contemporary" evenThere are more than 1.5 million records, but in recent years, the circulation of these magazines has dropped to less than 100,000 copies, and provincial literary publications in various places are even more difficult. Most of the provincial publications have only three or five thousand copies. "Ten years later, this situation has not improved, and the situation may be even more severe. According to the "Basic Situation of the National Press and Publishing Industry in 2018", there were 663 kinds of "literary and art periodicals in the country" compared with the previous year. The variety decreased by 0.30%, the average number of prints decreased by 14.46%, the total number of prints decreased by 20.65%, and the total number of printed sheets decreased by 22.50%. "This is only a reduction in a year, and the circulation of journals may prove the survival dilemma of serious literature.
For most Chinese today, print media and books are no longer scarce resources, and literary journals and The decline in the sales of serious literature books has little to do with the affordability of readers. In fact, the changes in the journal market in the 1990s have already demonstrated this problem: the decline in the number of subscriptions for serious literature journals, which represent elegant taste and classic aesthetics, is not People stopped reading magazines, but this type of magazines, because almost at the same time, a group of popular books that flourished created the myth of the media market, "Story Club", "Reader", "Friends", "Legend of Modern and Ancient". "," and later "Special Digest", etc., have caused sensational cultural phenomena; even in the Internet age, the readership of these publications is much larger than that of serious literary journals. There is only one reason why this kind of publication cannot attract readers: the content it publishes is not liked by readers. "Good-looking" is not the narrative goal of serious literature, it is no match for the popular literature that is the primary criterion in the entertainment age.
is lacking in the media Times, like embroidery within a square inch, literature always tries to include more content, more lasting value and more classic aesthetic meaning in a limited page, so as to make it more effective with half the effort. Therefore, in language , structure, perspective and rhetoric are carefully selected to complete the artistic shaping of typical images, which has become the most basic artistic technique of classic narrative. The rise of the media is in harmony with the accelerated pace of social life, and everyone has less time to focus on the same media. Readers' demand for reading (not just literary reading) is no longer the pursuit and persistence of eternal meaning, but the ability to obtain more, more direct, faster and more refreshing reading experience in a tight time period. Traditional journals The long and novella written by the author obviously do not meet this requirement, but the works of "Story Club", "Zhi Yin Style" and "Reader Style" are exactly what the readers expect: short in length, interesting in stories, straightforward in discussion, and simple in reasoning. Since the beginning of the new century, serious Short stories in literature are further shortened, and the popularity of "little novels", "miniature novels" and "flash novels" on paper and the Internet is just literature's adaptation to changes in the medium. In terms of content, theme and expression,
, The medium is also attacking the sturdy aesthetic fortress of the new literature. This is a subtle change that is not easily observable directly, but not without a trace, an example of which is the popularity of genre writing and its rise to the elegance of the past that only serious literature could advance. Shi Zhanjun, editor-in-chief of "People's Literature", when talking about why they publish genre novels, said: "Genre literature has been obscured for many years. Now when it comes to martial arts, everyone only thinks of Jin Yong, Gu Long, and Liang Yusheng of the older generation. However, there are still high-level works in the current martial arts theme, and their artistic maturity is no less than that of other pure literature. In addition, serious literature is alienated by popular readers, and the internal reason is that its expression does not fully conform to the public's aesthetic habits. Some scholars have discussed that the "legendary" stylistic tradition has been creatively transformed into novels since the new century. Continuation (Li Yuchun's "Renaissance of Chinese Literary Tradition"), which is exactly the symbol of the revival of popular narratives after the rise of the media, this trend is consistent with the revival trend of mass aesthetics.
is the opposite of the huge economic benefits of online literature. , most pure literary journals cannot survive independently in the market and must rely on financial subsidies, which further strengthens the dependence of the serious literary production mechanism centered on literary journals on the system, thus causing "aging", "circularization" and "marginalization". From newspapers to television, from television to the Internet, mass media has gone through several iterations from print to digital, from fixed to mobile, and from limited to unlimited. It provides a new media environment for literature. In the "hegemonic" expansion of media digitization, the solemn meaning represented by literature and books under the traditional thinking mode has been eliminated.Serious literature still stands at a crossroads.
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enter the literary production process under the influence of new media to observe, the literary society will show another mechanism and aspect.
Literature and art originated from games, and literature is also a kind of human game. When writing began to be used as a tool to help rulers establish authority, the power of literature was highlighted, and creation became a professional skill, but its game and entertainment elements did not disappear. Literature is a tool for authors to express their emotions and express their aspirations, but at the same time, it is also a way to entertain themselves and others in addition to subsistence and labor. Moreover, the process of creating a literary work is not only the creation of the writer's painstaking efforts and painstaking efforts, but also a form of entertainment. A craftsmanship in accordance with aesthetic maps and conventions.
In the classical literary tradition, the rhythmic poems, couplets, palindrome poems, Tibetan head poems, etc. with numerous rules and rigorous structures are all products of special writing techniques. In fact, this kind of formal choice is not necessary to express the theme. , it is more likely to be a game-like display of writing skills realized by means of communication (rhyme, antithesis, etc. for the convenience of memory). Focus on form. This is very similar to the installation works in modernism and postmodernism (it can be seen that there is an early echo between Chinese tradition and Western modernity), they show their identity as works of art through deliberate forms, and this form has A clear tendency to "dehumanize" (Ortega y Gasset, The Dehumanization of Art). Realism, as a tradition, achieves the purpose of manifesting or criticizing human nature with a natural, similar writing style to everyday narration. This is the basic method of literary narrative throughout the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Entering the new period, a more artistic sense of style appeared in the misty poems and avant-garde novels, and the "production" of writing was significantly enhanced.
entered the Internet age, observed creation from the perspective of "production", and tested the effect of media fusion to test how the writer's narration was paid attention to in the commotion of all beings. The Internet, as a real "virtual situation", called for new changes in literature. As we talked about earlier, publishing in journals relies on the power of the system to get more opportunities to push, the continuation of public aesthetics in serious writing, and the stylistic changes of short stories are all manifestations of this "production", which are in the narrative. The artistic expression on the top tries to make some people not understand it to increase the sense of mysterious art, while the popularized part tries to make some people read it smoothly to gain understanding and recognition, which is most common in the writing of poetry and avant-garde novels.
In the online literature, the online articles before commercialization in the first five years of the new century are still the product of spontaneous writing and passionate writing. After the establishment of the reading fee system, the online articles embarked on the road of conscious writing, under the influence of the commercial mechanism. Develop a set of "making craftsmanship" to establish its own image suitable for public reading. For example, "Xiaobaiwen" has become the basic law of Internet literature, which aesthetically rejects the expression of serious literature, and eliminates the reading barriers of ordinary readers through language methods such as easy-to-understand, close to daily life, and extensive use of Internet terms; in some In the works that combine virtual and real, the characters in reality suddenly lose consciousness due to accidents such as car accidents, collisions, illnesses, etc., and then realize time-space travel and rebirth. This kind of plot has no logic at all, but is carried out to achieve novel effects. The text production; the long story is divided into parts, each chapter has roughly the same number of words and has a relatively independent plot and a small climax, which is enough to make the reader enjoy reading in a limited time, the author would rather sacrifice the integrity of the structure. To perform this technical operation. In addition, as an important feature of genre works, stereotyped writing produces new works by substituting different time, space, region, characters and other elements in different narrative modes. The fate of characters and emotional logic principles familiar to readers such as evil will eventually be defeated, and it is full of production meaning. The change of
media fusion to literature is also reflected in the intertextual relationship with other textual forms. In serious literature, if a work cannot be displayed in other art forms such as film and television, stage play because of its complex artistic techniques and ambiguous themes, it is considered to be highly artistic, such as stream-of-consciousness novels. But in the internet age, that concept is flipping, and it's an honor to turn words into images. The increase of scene descriptions and the enhancement of the sense of picture in serious literature means that the subtle influence of image aesthetics since the popularization of television has already taken effect in literature; in online literature, the IP potential and performance that can be transformed into film and television, games, animation, etc. have become one of the core indicators for evaluating online works. In the era of new media, literary works are no longer a seamless piece of art that is difficult to decompose and deconstruct, and have independent aesthetic value, but become hypertexts that can be restructured by different artistic techniques and adapt to different communication formats and audience aesthetic preferences. Although the transformation between different textual forms is an artistic re-creation process, the intertextual relationship between the hypertext and its differentiated subtexts takes the form of product development, which turns a literary work into a It is the starting point in the production chain of the cultural industry, rather than the ultimate result of the writer's artistic creation. In secular life, the gap between literary works and other consumer cultural products is being bridged; when we talk about a novel, we may be talking about a book, a script for a movie, or a Bit-traffic stars acted in one of those roles, not as a literary novel itself. The transformation from creation to production is a major change in the nature of literary artistic activity since the beginning of the new century.
McLuhan said: "All media influence us completely and completely. Media influence is extremely penetrating, omnipresent, and occurs in all aspects of personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical and social. Influence, all aspects of us are touched, influenced, and changed.” He also said that “society is shaped by the medium through which people communicate, not by the content of communication, both ancient and modern.” ( "The Medium is Massage"), literature that can only exist by relying on the medium cannot escape the fate of being "shaped". When the dawn of the new century turns into the rising sun, the digital and interactive Internet has emerged as the main media carrier instead of paper media and one-way low-level electronic terminals. , completely changed the pattern of Chinese literature. The rise of the medium has brought literature to life both by confronting it with the most serious challenges in its history. Today, the vigorous media revolution is in full swing. With the advent of the AI era, the infinite possibilities of literature have become more unpredictable. The development of the past two decades has proved that this century will surely be a brand new era of literature.
This article was first published on China Writers Network on August 11, 2020.
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Liu Jun | Overseas Chinese Literature in the New Century: "Offshore Current" or "Provincial Books"?
Fang Wei | What do we "learn" from online novels?
Mu Hongyan | 21st Century Iranian Literature: Diversified Presentations Driven by Literary Awards A memo or observation note of 20 years of century poetry: looked up and forgotten
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