On Beauty. On Literature

Author: Zhu Guangqian
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1988-02-25
Features: To help everyone learn this course, we have designed several thinking and exploration questions, which can be roughly divided into two types: one is about aesthetics, including aesthetic functions, aesthetic psychology, etc.; the other is about literature, including literary tastes, literary language, literary styles, etc. We hope that through the reflection and discussion of these questions, everyone can grasp the mysteries of literature and aesthetics. This small book, Aesthetics, is designed to help you navigate through some confusion. It allows you to transform those miscellaneous forces into a formal army; streamline redundancies, replenish equipment, as the saying goes, "the army thrives on quality, not quantity." It also guides you along straightforward paths, ensuring you don’t wander aimlessly in the wilderness or get stuck in narrow corners. Additionally, it teaches you how to apply new tactics in our traditional environment. Naturally, it can only provide one or two examples for you to learn from and generalize further. It corrects your mistakes, points out your shortcomings, and encourages you to move forward. The author is a familiar face—he once wrote Twelve Letters to You. His sincere tone and witty style are something you won’t forget. On Literature: Literature is endless to discuss, and there are far too many introductory books on the market. Such books are of little use, and everyone knows it. Learning literature is a matter of deeply engaging with the works of renowned authors, followed by practicing writing yourself. Only in this way can you personally experience the sweetness and bitterness, gradually cultivating a refined taste and learning the perspective and empathy of a literary figure to observe and understand human emotions and the world. When you reach this stage, your literary cultivation can be considered largely successful. Without working on this, reading any number of books on literature will be futile.