Abstract Compared with the New literature school,the literary thoughts of Xueheng School are relatively conservative.As far as the reasons for this contrast is concerned,firstly it is due to their different degrees of recognition of national culture;secondly,it is result that they have different choices of Western cultural tradition.For this,the formation of the concept of literature development is a typical example.Owing to the influence of the Chinese and foreign traditional thinking of″time,″regarding both the understanding of the phenomenon of literature and the interpretation of the development of literature,Xueheng School has a strong flavor of classicism.The classical view of time is that time is mainly a kind of cycle,a historical cognitive pattern which regards time as a cycle of circular motion.Both in the East and in the West,for the classical thinkers,the understanding of the essence of history couldn't go beyond the limitation of this historical view.Affected by such concept,Xueheng School had a tendency towards classical cultural tradition in the Western cultural resources,an important part of which is the concept of circular time.At the same time,it also inherited some of oriental philosophy,such as things will turn to the opposite after reaching the extreme,there is an permanent alternation between disorder and order. Blending of this oriental philosophy and western Pendulum theory,not only provides a theoretical source for Xueheng School in terms of historical interpretation,but also forms a unique perspective for their observation about the evolution of literature.The scholars of Xueheng School insist that just as life,literature has also two models shifting between spring and summer,that is to say,literature development is the cycle of spring and summer model. They further recognize that from the individual to writers, the development of literature cannot go beyond such two styles of reincarnation — flat and gorgeous,and the evolution of Chinese and foreign literature failed to change the alternation between plebeianstyle and aristocratic faction. By contrast,there is a linear time mode,a kind of historical cognition model which was born in modern times.With the development of modern science,some theories(including evolution of species,social evolution), change the traditional sense of history effectively, therefore the conception of evolution had become a common sense of history as well.In modern Chinese,the attitude toward the conception of evolution passed through a tortuous course from rej ection to acceptance,in which Yan Fu,Liang Qichao and other thinkers played an important role.In the field of literature,Hu Shi and other New Literature writers introduced linear evolution theory into literary narration, correspondingly making literary concept of historical progress a mainstream idea in narrative of literary history.However,this vector concept of time is subject to amendment from Xueheng School's cycle time view.Finally Xueheng School,which was based on the concept of circular,had fierce and protracted debates about literature development with the New literature school that advocates the concept of evolution as its theory support. Practically speaking,either the linear theory or the cyclical theory,is the perspectives for observing historical phenomena,both contains truth and false part.The complexity of history is far more than the labels attached to it.Linear evolution theory is not directly equal to modernity, while cycle time mode of classical flavor is not necessarily anti-modernity.So why the historical concept of Xueheng School was marked as anti-modernity? In our view what concerns is the constraints of the times context,that is,the control effect of the politics of time.
|