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A Crossroad Between Literature and Politics

  • JOURNAL OF CHINESE STUDIES
  • 2020, (69), pp.81-102
  • DOI : 10.26585/chlab.2020..69.004
  • Publisher : CHINESE STUDIES INSTITUTE
  • Research Area : Humanities > Chinese Language and Literature
  • Received : July 15, 2020
  • Accepted : September 2, 2020
  • Published : September 30, 2020

Ko Jum Bok 1

1고려대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In The New Democracy(新民主主義論), written in January 1940, Mao Zedong says, “Luxun is not only a claim to the Chinese cultural revolution, a great litterateur but also a great thinker and a great revolutionary.” It is no exaggeration to say that Mao Zedong’s expression of Lu Xun was the basic guideline for evaluating Lu Xun. This article has raised questions about the roots of the differences between Mao Zedong’s Chinese revolution and the Lu Xun‘s revolution of nationality reform, and I will discuss them through a review of the relationship between politics and literature. To this end, this paper will first examine the political nature of Lu Xun’s interpretation by Mao Zedong. Next, after reviewing Mao Zedong’s and Lu Xun’s views on the relationship between literature and politics, we will discuss commonalities and differences between literature and politics. Mao Zedong’s political revolution and Lu Xun’s literary revolution for the reconstruction of nationality primarily seeks objective and rational visualization of reality. In contrast, Mao Zedong’s intervention in reality was a political and military strategy, while Lu Xun’s intervention in reality was a literary strategy that expressed Chinese thoughts and spirit. But both are the same in that they come from objective and rational perceptions of reality and the Chinese. In other words, the visualization of Chinese reality is indispensable whether it is Mao Zedong’s revolution or Lu Xun’s revolution. This is the intersection of politics and literature. But politics seeks to maintain and unify phenomena, while literature urges social evolution to separate. In other words, the distinctive feature of literary art can be said to pioneer a new horizon of perception by continually dismantling and reconstructing the relationship between concepts and things that are fixed politically, ideologically and ideologically. Politics, on the other hand, uses, promotes, inspires and incites such literature to promote revolution and complete revolution. After the completion of the revolution, politics has no choice but to stay away from the literary arts due to its inherent nature: the maintenance of phenomena and the unification (or the maintenance of power). As such, literature and politics go a long way after the success of the revolution.

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