Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.1, 2018

 

Virtual Experience and Literary Imagination: A New Theory of Chinese Online Literature

(Abstract)

 

Li Yangquan

 

Against the background of world online literature, exploration of the new qualities of Chinese online literature is an important and urgent task. This requires that we seek, in the distinctive features of online literature (that is, the transition from print to online media), to find the “middle way” in which it is situated, and reveal the internet era’s existential experience and literary imagination beneath the mass commercial surface. Chinese online literature draws inspiration from the daily interactions between the people of today and the interconnected online world, passing through an online interface that divides time and space between “online” and “offline” worlds and drawing imaginative inspiration from the virtual and the interactive. It provides a metaphorical presentation of the symbiosis of the accompanying relationship of modern man and the online network, with its virtual intersubjectivity, the “reset” experience of online life and its psychological symptoms. Chinese online literature reveals the social, cultural and literary trends and changes following the advent of online society; this constitutes its unique value and has a certain significance for the world.