Abstract:
With such established responsibilities as recording, witnessing, reflecting and warning, description of disasters in the 20thcentury Chinese literature was characteristic of relatively centralized literary types, imbalanced stages of development, diverse and abundant themes and embarrassing artistic description. For survival hardship, it showed hunger and misery in exile and opposition between urban and rural civilizations; for class rival, it emphasized class oppression and identity characterization, embodying the thinking mode of dual opposition; for cultural reflection, it concerned cannibalism and political culture, meaning to recover human character and examine power; and for ecological environment, it criticized technological reasoning and pragmatism, attacking the dominant conception and interests worship under the guidance of modern ideological system. The artistic gene and potential constraint of disaster description involved cultural traditions, epical contest and the writer’s individual alternative. As far as artistic representation is concerned, it adopted more realistic description than fictional imagination, presenting a state of “repeated monophony”, more reality presentation than aesthetic elevation, remaining undisguised realistic writing, more emotional drainage than meaning seeking, showing more imagination than experience. Description of disasters seeks profound themes and novel art, so a feasible means to it is resources synthesis, accommodation of views and mutual interpretation of cultures.
