Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 7, 2023

The New Rural Narrative and Its Cultural Logic

(Abstract)

Li Zhen

The new rural narrative is a literary phenomenon that is taking shape in the course of Chinese-style modernization. The transformation of the mode of production in rural society and the concomitant three occurrences of cultural discontinuity mean that the Chinese rural narrative has evolved continuously. In the third cultural break, the historical context and cultural elements of the three rural narrative traditions produced by the first two occurrences of cultural discontinuity are undergoing transition and alteration; thus the cultural logic of the new rural narrative has evolved from binary opposition to multiple conflicts and integrations. In this process, new narrative fulcrums such as writings on cultural nostalgia, ecological concerns, and new images of rural figures have all begun to take shape, presenting new aesthetic forms including a lofty aesthetics based on multiple conflicts-integrations-symbiosis in which the “truth” serves as an aesthetic principle and a non-fictional strategy. The process has also given rise to new narrative paradigms such as the reconstruction of the narrative entity, exploration of multi-dimensional narrative perspectives, and expansion of the temporal and spatial scope of narrative topics.