The Scar Literature After "the Cultural Revolution"
Powerpoint Slide
File:FINAL DE The Scar Literature.pptx
Brief Introduction
*During the “Cultural Revolution”, many educated youngsters were involved in the “countryside sports”.
The emergence of the "scar literature" directly resulted from it, which mainly describes the tragic experience of the educated youth, intellectuals, persecuted officials and ordinary people in urban and rural areas.
Representative works
* The representative works :《The Head Teacher》《The Scar》《Xu Mao and His Daughters》《Kid from the Forest》
One early “Scar Literature” was named “The Class Monitor”，published in 1977, which was commented to have the similar influence as “The Madman's Diary ” by Lu Xun.
And other works which talk about the Culture revolution or focus on the trauma of that period are all defined as scar literature.
General Comment
*“The Scar Literature” focused on the superficial description full of emotional anger, lacking in profound thoughts about the tragic.
But it brought up a series of social problems, thus featured with the nature of humanity.
*The Scar Literature is the first climate of tragedy in modern Chinese literature.
On the aspect of thought,it has makde great contribution to the negativatioin of the Cultural Revolution; On the aspect of art, it has first brought the awareness of "tragedy" to the modern Chinese literature circle, which can be described as the "original color "of the literature in the new era. And because of this, the depressing asmosphere within that age came out, which was exactly the significance of the Scar Literature in modern Chinese literature.
*Its historical significance is to reveal the transformation from the extremely radical to the extremely convertional and to push the deepening process of the realism,
all standing on the modern historical process.
*While soon the slogan "looking forward" aws brought up, and it made the Scar Literature almost end halfway,
which caused its failure of historcial content with greater compatibility and masterpieces with great value in beauty of tragedy. But it has broken the stereotype of the extremely radical from the "Four Gang", and has described the tragedy where the human nature was destroyed by the autocracy , thus becoming the pioneer of the socialistic humanity literature in the new era.
The first exemplar of the genre is generally agreed to be Lu Xinhua's 1978 story "Scar", which attacked official hypocrisy and corruption.Liu Xinwu's 1977 short story "The Class Monitor" has also been described as the pioneer of scar literature, though this assessment is disputed.
Most of the representative authors were in their thirties and forties at the time; they worked as salaried writers and editors, and published their works in state-sponsored literary journals. The moral outrage they expressed in their works resonated with the public, contributing to its popularity.
Recent Research about Scar Literature
At that time,however, scar literature did not entirely receive a free pass from the Party establishment; due to its criticisms of the Communist Party and of Mao himself, as well as its exposure of social problems, it came under attack by conservatives as early as 1979. Events such as the trial of Wei Jingsheng signalled writers that there were limits to the open discussion of the past errors of the Party, and after the end of the trial of the Gang of Four, the political climate chilled significantly.[9] Eventually, the government began to crack down on scar literature as part of a wider campaign against "bourgeois liberalism".[10] Deng Xiaoping himself provided major support for the campaign, even though his return to Chinese politics after his earlier disgrace and his political victory over rival Hua Guofeng relied heavily on the repudiation of ultra-leftist Maoism inherent in scar literature, and its influence on public opinion.[6][10] The campaign against scar literature was itself unusual in that, unlike earlier campaigns against liberalism, official criticisms were generally limited to attacks on its content, rather than denunciations of individuals.[11](selected from Wikipedia) Nowadays people tend to review the period of cultural revolution and reevaluate those works that show the life of public intellectuals. The symbol of scar literature is the trauma and the pain, but there are more and more people believe that those works intentionally exaggerate the pain of ordinary people to gain sympathy. And those scar literature is quite depressed and full of complain, but doesn't come up with methods to avoid such tragedy happen again. it's more like the political writing not the literature creation. So more and more critics are focused on the literature then raise their criticism.