THE CONCEPT OF “METHOD” IN CHINESE LITERARY STUDIES

Abstract

The article examines the system of concepts used in Chinese literary criticism to characterize the literary process – “creative method”, “literary movement” and “literary group”; information is provided on the stages of formation in Chinese literature of the 20th century of various creative methods (primarily realism), and the meaning attached to the concept of “creative method” is analyzed. The work notes the impact on Chinese criticism and literary criticism of the 1930s of F. Engels’s ideas about realism and the practice of “socialist realism”, formed under the influence of the Soviet Union. Interest in the concept of “creative method” in Chinese literary criticism grew again at the end of the 20th – beginning of the 21st centuries with the aim of studying the modern literary process. During these years, the main concepts used to describe the literary process were “creative method”, “literary movement” and “literary group”, to which literary scholars and critics assigned different meanings. The article analyzes the practice of using the concept of “postrealism” in Chinese literary studies, in contrast to other terms such as “realism”, “neorealism” and “postmodernism”. The article concludes that the term “neorealism” should be used to characterize “late” realism of the late 19th – early 20th centuries, while the term “post-realism” should be used to describe the phenomena of the late 20th – early 21st centuries, in which individual techniques borrowed from earlier artistic methods, including romanticism, neorealism, modernism and postmodernism. The idea is expressed that the works of modern writers often do not fit neatly into stable “directional”, genre or stylistic forms, therefore, in order to characterize new artistic phenomena it is necessary to constantly update the terminological apparatus, adapting it to the specific features of modern art.