Literary Sociology

Mr. Wang recalls the academic life and discipline of his predecessors in the Academy of Social Sciences, Qian Zhongshu and He Qifang, and discusses the frontier issues of Song Dynasty literary research, theoretical development and documentary integration of essayology, lyricism research and creation of old poems, etc. This article is an excerpt from the chapter of the book "Frontier Issues in the Study of Song Dynasty Literature".

Hou Tijian: I have also noticed a phenomenon, for example, there are many works on "literary sociology", "literary communication" and "literary psychology", and many scholars call them Most of the time, "literary so-and-so" only represents a method, vision and perspective of literary research, not the establishment of a new discipline. "The term "literary geography" is also widely used, and many times we just see it as a method and perspective, and no one would doubt the close relationship between literature and geography. However, if we want to raise it to the height of a new discipline that "stands side by side with the discipline of literary history", it is still immature, at least for the time being. At the annual meeting in Ganzhou, in addition to literature and geography, you also expressed different views on the use of statistics in literature, especially in the subject of literature and communication.

Wang Shuizhao: At the Ganzhou annual meeting, I talked about my views on the phenomena in literature and communication and literature and regional studies, which also aroused some discussions at the annual meeting. At first I had some concerns, because the targets of the criticism are very good friends, and they are also late generations, one is Wang Zhaopeng and the other is Zeng Daxing, both of them are very good scholars, and they are very accomplished in these two fields, but I considered that this is an academic issue, not personal, and not with any selfishness, so I decided to submit this article for discussion only in the last few days before the meeting. During the conference, Wang Zhaopeng gave me his book "Exploring the Original of Literary Communication in the Song Dynasty", the preface of which is a dialogue between him and Xiao Peng, the content of which is very good, talking about many important issues on the subject of literary communication, which shows that Wang Zhaopeng has a clear understanding of the relationship between literature and communication. My paper focused on questions about the use of statistical methods in the book "Song Lists". Zhaopeng and I also exchanged views during the conference, and we basically agreed that statistics, as a research method, can be introduced into literary studies, but the flaws of this method are also obvious and need constant improvement. I once compiled a book with Japanese scholar Kakan Yoshiaki, "Essays on Chinese Lyricism by Japanese Scholars", and I summarized the research methods of the Japanese lexicographers in the introduction of the book, the first of which is the statistical method, starting from quantitative analysis and then qualitative analysis. However, it should be acknowledged that it is still quite effective within a certain scope of literary research". For example, in the case of the study of themes, the statistics based on the "All Song Lyrics" show that certain themes were popular among lyricists and that certain themes emerged at a certain time, and so on.

Hou Tijian: The word "ranking" itself is entertaining, which conflicts with the academic nature that Mr. Wang Zhaopeng emphasizes. In fact, Mr. Wang is doing this seriously, but the word "ranking" has caused a lot of controversy. There was a so-called "unreadable list" on the Internet, and "Dream of the Red Chamber" topped the list, which truly reflects the loss of traditional culture in the commercial tide, and also shows that the "list" is indeed a signboard that can cater to the market, and the publisher At the same time, it also shows that "ranking" is indeed a signboard that can cater to the market, and the publisher's name of "Tang Poetry Ranking" and "Song Lyrics Ranking" has the purpose of catching attention. I have also read Mr. Wang Zhaopeng's article in Social Science, "Talking about the evaluation index and weight setting of literary rankings", which mentions such indexes as exemplary, reputation, popularity, and contribution rate of famous articles, especially the new "contribution rate of famous articles" to make the statistics more scientific. But I feel that this concept is a bit roundabout, how to determine the famous articles? It is difficult to say the criteria. For example, Wu Wenying's words are so influential in the world of words, but are they famous? I'm afraid that there are not many masterpieces by Wu Wenying, and I'm afraid that not as many people know Wu Wenying as Zhu Shuzhen.

Wang Shuizhao: I personally have another opinion, that is, the use of statistical methods in literary research should be limited. Literature is a humanities discipline, and statistics is based on data, and this method works differently for the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities. Natural science research objects are relatively objective, statistical data can explain the problem, such as epidemiology, you statistics out of a certain period of time what disease is most prevalent, the most deaths, these need a large number of statistics, and the statistical results are very important to the study; social sciences, the method of statistics has been limited, such as the criticism of the "university ranking For example, the "university ranking" which is criticized by everyone, is the one in the top necessarily better than the one behind? There are still many questions here. And in the humanities, the statistical method requires even more discretionary consideration. For example, speaking of the influence of literary scholars, Su Shi was influenced by Tao Yuanming, what we can count is often explicit, how many "and Tao poems" this is obvious, how many times the verse is used and the context is used can also be figured out; but how Tao Yuanming's creative spirit, ideological attitude, philosophical views influenced Su Shi, this can only be platitudes literature, logical inference. And can not be statistical, only qualitative research, not quantitative research, so the study of statistics is limited. Some scholars believe that the statistical method of studying literature, "the more indicators set, the more scientific and reasonable", this view certainly has a certain degree of reasonableness, but the indicators set also depends on the scientific degree of the indicators themselves, if the indicators set is not scientific, then the more is actually the more unreasonable. For example, the same Song lyrics anthology, expert anthology and popular anthology are completely different in nature and represent different influences, but from the statistics are the same vote; and then because of the background of the times, the influence of Song lyrics works are also different, during the war against Japan, I'm afraid there is no one word influence than the title Yue Fei's "Man Jiang Hong".

And I am very worried about how much academic value there is in spending a lot of effort on statistical data, and whether the limited academic resources will be wasted due to the large amount of statistical work? This resource includes both general academic information and more artificial and intellectual resources. There are similar problems in the study of literary geography, for example, the study of place of origin, the place of origin of a writer is of course very important, Mr. Tang Guizhang's "Song Dynasty Lyricist's Nationality Examination" is a very good article, from which we can see that the lyricist was generally distributed in the south, and the lyric is "southern literature", which has certain reference significance for our understanding of the spread of the lyric and even the aesthetic qualities of the lyric. It has some significance for our understanding of the spread of words and even their aesthetic qualities. But this is where the statistics of place of origin stop, and it would not be of much academic value to put much effort into studying the relationship between place of origin and literature. For example, I often say that the example of Ouyang Xiu, his place of origin is Jiangxi Luling, born in Sichuan Mian Yang, he has a certain Luling complex, but must say that Luling brought him a great influence on literature, the body has the characteristics of Jiangxi literature, it is impossible to say, because he only went there once in his life. Another example is that I am a native of Yiyao, Zhejiang Province, and grew up in Yiyao, Yiyao belongs to the east of Zhejiang, and has a strong academic tradition, but my academics are the three units of Peking University, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Fudan University, the academic lineage, who said that my academics are influenced by the academics of the east of Zhejiang, that is certainly nonsense. Therefore, I very much hope that the academic community will use its limited resources to the edge of the sword and not do some work of little value (of course, not completely worthless).

Hou Tijian: I also share the same feeling about these problems that you talked about. For example, an article on family literature lists a very detailed network of families and in-laws, with all seven aunts and eight uncles listed. Of course, there may be historical value. It just feels as if people are using certain methods or materials, getting lost in the methods and materials themselves, or even getting drunk on them, and forgetting the original intention. You once concluded that this is "the dizzying of theory and the carnival of data", which is precise and accurate.

Wang Shuizhao: On the other hand, if we keep doing such statistics and form a certain database that we can use, whoever has a good eye may be able to find some important phenomena. For example, the Chinese Historical Geographic Information System (CHGIS) jointly developed by our Fudan Historical Geography Research Center and Harvard East Asia Department, and the Chinese Biographical Database (CBDB) developed by Bao Bide and his group are very useful in studying the intercourse network of the Song scholars, and many topics can be discovered from them. In addition, I also saw a book "Song Dynasty Jiangxi Literati", because we already have the electronic database of "All Song Writings", "All Song Poems" and "All Song Lyrics", this book is equivalent to a compilation of small biographies of Song Dynasty Jiangxi writers together with slight additions, the value is limited, but if someone doing research on Song Dynasty Jiangxi regional literature can get some new data from it, it will not lose its significance.