Myth Made by Mass Media (On Zhang Henshu's Life as a Journalist and Newspaper-like Texts)

Author: Liu Shaowen
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: This book attempts to study Zhang Henshu and his novel texts from a new perspective—the influence of the pressman's profession on the life and creative consciousness of a writer. In Zhang Henshu's life and creative awareness, the core impact of the pressman's profession is evident: it not only changed his way of life but also corrected his traditional scholar's negative and detached worldview, and determined his active engagement with the world and his creative consciousness of intervening in life. The pressman's profession had a multifaceted influence on his novel texts: its material was largely drawn from the rich mine of news accumulated through journalistic life; its focus on urban life and depiction of distorted society and deformed human existence were both determined by the network layout of the newspaper medium and the critical consciousness of the pressman; the pure characters in Zhang Henshu's novels, though untainted by the mire, all met tragic fates. The tragedy of these pure characters contained both a condemnation of the distorted society and an attempt to enhance the of the narrative; one of the factors that made Zhang Henshu's novel texts captivating to a wide readership was their language, and the core influence on this language was the writing style of newspaper journalism—creating short sentences, emphasizing verbs, and using clichéd vocabulary; the degree of narrative freedom is crucial for the creation of extroverted realist novels, yet Zhang Henshu's narrative strategy could not be separated from journalistic elements—such as the journalist's perspective and the journalistic persona; the "sub-genre" made the text's discourse "heterogeneous" and "socialized," while the "paratext" helped shape the text through the flexible use of media techniques; even the limitations of the text—such as roughness and premature ending—were deeply marked by the negative imprint of mass media: this was both a common flaw of journalist-writers and an inherent ailment of newspaper serials.