Talking about the new generation of literature in each era is not to refer to the metabolism of biological age, but to talk about the new aesthetic expression in the era of intergenerational colonization, and to talk about a possibility of regeneration and creation.
Generation Z and Generation M have become the identity symbols of young people in this era. In addition to the experience of the era that transcends generations, what confirms their identity is the common memory of fantasy, science fiction, and the second dimension.
In the era in which they grew up, virtual space-time and parallel universes were already involved.
In terms of media, the literary expression of the new generation is actually inseparable from the Internet.
Not even just the medium, but the worldview.
The setting of time travel and rebirth, the way of life of otaku and social networking invaded the field of entertainment and aesthetics, the imaginary preference of post-human, sci-fi or fantasy... Could new human beings and new youth redefine literature?
In the most popular online literature stories, there are new aesthetic possibilities and intergenerational experiences created by the Internet generation.
At the end of May 2022, the "2021 Online Youth List" selected by the college readers representing Generation Z and M will be announced.
Judging from the 12 works on the list, the experience of online students, virtual setting and gamification experience have brought new literary imagination to the "new generation". Among these most popular online literary stories, there are hidden stories created by the online generation. The new aesthetic may be related to intergenerational experience.
Although Southern Chihuo's "Businesswoman" and her and Deng's "Watching Crane Notes" still set the protagonist as a transmigrator, transmigration is obviously just an imaginary lead.
The microeconomics leads the context of modern history, infiltrates the people's view of history into the writing of "Qing Chuanwen", and looks at China's modernization process from a global perspective, thus realizing the reconstruction of tradition and history in the Internet generation.
The heroine of "Women's Merchant", as an orphan at the bottom, thinks about and achieves the history of individuals and nations in the late Qing Dynasty when "changes" were taking place everywhere.
"Notes on Watching Cranes" is developed from a piece of historical data that cannot be incorporated into a smooth narrative. The transmigrators endow the research objects of 600 years ago with subjectivity, in fact, they are looking for spiritual resources for researchers 600 years later.
The "literary heart" of the scholar-officials for the country is not only reflected in the generous speeches in temples, but also in the "inner saints and outer kings" in personal beliefs.
Deng Ying and Yang Wan have the same mind, which is a symbol of the continuous context.
The author retells a leafy "non-fiction" biography in quaint style, expressing the romantic spirit that truly belongs to scholars, thus expanding the boundaries of history and extending the branches of imagination.
And Shen Xiaozhi's "Qingyuntai" starts from social issues and places phenomenal events in a different time and space to explore their social effects.
By going back to the beginning and end of a phenomenal event, tracing the waves it caused in all social strata, showing the line between reality and illusion, belief and obsession, summoning the questioning spirit in the depths of human nature, and presenting the multi-dimensional mirror image of the grand image and the complex human nature dappled light.
Yun Zhu's "Neon Run at Night" uses the memory and perspective of the anthropomorphic object Neon to intervene in the changing period of the earth's civilization, imagining the essence of "human" and "inhuman" emotions, the residence of the soul, the rights of "life" and "thinking". "Boundary.
Dancing is in "Stabilize the Waves", imagining the collision between the underground world and the fireworks on earth...
Many people are paying attention to what the new generation of writers are writing. In fact, for them, they are writing about their life in this era. The new generation of online literature represents the current appearance of the new era, and it can be heard from it. The remnants of fantasy worlds such as The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, etc., also glimpse the shadow of games such as escape room, werewolf killing, script killing, etc. The expression and thinking methods with contextual colors have become an indelible narrative in the new generation of works. Background and inline rhetoric.
The new generation of online literature writers fully demonstrate the survival status of young people in all walks of life, and this survival experience is different from the previous time and space.
For example, "Escape Record" generates a narrative in the mode of WeChat chat, and the long pictures and texts of the WeChat dialogue windows build a "room escape"-style ring forest.
The closed "secret room", the surrounding environment with hidden crisis, incomplete survival clues, and a few confused humans tried their best to seize the only chance to survive.
On the one hand, this unique narrative method brings readers an immersive reading experience, and on the other hand, it stands at the forefront of the era of new media interconnection, showing the new imagination, new ideas and new attempts of the young group for gamified narrative.
"Small Town Topic Home" outlines a delicate portrait of the new generation of young people with dreamy and erratic brushstrokes, and uses stream-of-consciousness techniques to show that young people who have grown older than the prosperous era are facing the expectations of their parents, "labeling" and "passive socialization". The bitter mood at the time, the psychological reality of being entangled but powerless, writes the growth experience and social symptoms of the new generation of young people about meaning and anxiety, and at the same time, the forms, mind maps and playlists attached to the hypertext form show the new media platform. multiple narrative possibilities.
In a seemingly fictional world, new propositions about reality are constantly emerging.
Talking Elbow's "The Nomenclature of the Night" points to the multi-dimensionality of the world in "appearance" and "essence", "signifier" and "signified"; Pseudo-ring's "The Ninth District" is based on food and environment, justice and The topics of evil, peace and struggle, human nature and home and country frame the "Ninth Special Zone"; the dialectical relationship between "meaning" and "shape" in "From the Red Moon" by Montenegro Lao Gui runs through as a clue of the soul, through the spiritual variation. The Logic Chain digs deep into the depths of the modern civilization we are immersed in.
Emphasizing the "new generation" is to emphasize a different kind of literary imagination, the context is continuing, the spirit is being reshaped, and fresh air is pouring in.
The current online literature is more and more "different" from traditional literature in introducing new themes and constructing new time and space.
From the magnificent fantasy world full of traditional Chinese cultural elements, to the game settings linked to the two-dimensional culture, from the conception of the overall metaverse to the rearrangement of the time and space of daily life, online literature has brought new ideas, new The travels and new touches of his novels have gone beyond the scope of existing literary experience.
The significance of the so-called new generation of literature is also highlighted.
The online literature that attracts a large number of young readers and young authors does not pursue pure "literariness", but makes them expand the territory of "literature" expression beyond the discipline of "literature" in traditional literature.
The combination of science fiction and fantasy embeds parallel time and space in daily life, and such works appear in large numbers in the new generation of online literature works.
What they bring is not only new themes and new imaginations, but also attention to current new social issues and new emotional expressions.
The "Starting from the Red Moon" by Montenegro's old ghost has no shortage of in-depth observations on the psychological problems of today's people, the spiritual pollution of loneliness, fear and illusion, the spiritual pollution caused by the busy work and neglect of children, and the spiritual pollution caused by the perfect greed. The spiritually polluted body brought about by the possessiveness born of love, the spiritually polluted body of sleep deprivation... These "mutations" do not seem to be far away from themselves, and the logical chain of spiritual mutation is rooted in the depths of the modern civilization we are immersed in. place.
Some patients with depression really gave her feedback after reading the work...Tian Rui Shuofu's "We Live in Nanjing" created a Chinese version of the story of high school students saving the world, in a professional sci-fi setting, wonderful In addition to the story and delicate emotions, it presents an aesthetic style that is scarce in sci-fi works.
At one end, "Panxia passed through Crescent Lake hundreds of times, went into the water to pick lotus roots hundreds of times, and touched the capsule hundreds of times with my hands groping in the mud... Hundreds and thousands of times passed by. , just for the last encounter", and at one end is "the time when I accidentally fell asleep" in the examination room, the ties and thoughts flowed in the works.
In today's age of being able to connect anytime, anywhere, with the ever-increasing number of friends in the address book, is inadvertent alienation and loneliness.
"We Live in Nanjing" reawakens the precipitation of tenderness and makes it travel through time and space. When "Small Questions" and "38 Sets" are interspersed, the presentation of time in "We Live in Nanjing" is no longer limited to the scope of physics , which simultaneously expresses a metaphor about the past/present/future of human civilization.
There will not always be someone in the new generation, but there will always be someone in the "new generation". To define it as the new generation will show what kind of spiritual turn and space-time proposition they have compared with the old generation.
The historical development of online literature for more than 20 years has produced many propositions that hit the crux of the times through countless iterations.
The intergenerational change of traditional literature takes ten years as a step, but for online literature, it redefines the flow rate and connotation of intergenerational.
Different from the "elite", "grassroots" and "commercial" that Internet literature has gone through, the emphasis on "new generation" is to emphasize a different kind of literary imagination. This updated literary imagination has built a new generation. international experience.
The new structure, the new mood, the continuation of the context, the reshaping of the spirit, and the influx of fresh air.
The new generation of literature means new era propositions and the possibility of literary expression. These changes are not only happening in online literature (genre literature). The fourth issue of the newly published "Jiangnan" magazine "Young Writers' Works Album" ranks first. It is a "post-00" phalanx composed of unfamiliar authors such as Zhang Yutian, Cheng Tianhui, Huang Huai, Wang Ningjing, and Bian Chuyue. The writing of the aborigines on the Internet has not only "written on the Internet".
The literary critics are also acutely aware of the arrival of the new generation of literature. Recently, I have seen many friends discussing the writers of Generation Z. However, for the new generation of literature, how do we name them?
Looking at it now, it is not so much how much they have in common, but more uncertainty and growth, and this uncertainty and growth may be giving birth to the possibility of future Chinese literature.
(Author: He Ping is a professor at the School of Literature, Nanjing Normal University)