
Best Chinese Short Stories of the Year 2011
by He Shaojun
About This Novel
When reading short stories in 2011, I often find some unfamiliar names, which makes me happy. Accompanying this joy is the fact that some good novels are written by young writers, which is really a blessing. Why I value this so much is because it is not only related to the successors of short story writing, but also related to whether purely literary novels can survive. We generally divide novels into novels, novellas and short stories. In my opinion, short stories are literary novel styles. Modern short stories were written from the May 4th Movement until the 21st century. After a century of repeated training, it should be said that they have become a quite mature style. Around the 21st century, a series of social and cultural changes have occurred, such as the market economy, the Internet, new media based on high technology, etc. The impact of these changes on literature cannot be underestimated. But only the short story seems indifferent to these external onslaughts. This shows that the short story genre has matured into a quite solid fortress. It represents the aesthetic form of traditional novels and will not cater to external changes. In order to adapt to the new literary production environment, many literary styles have to change their appearance, and the changes are nothing more than two ways. One is to force many new factors that adapt to the current consumer era into literature, and the other is to dilute the literariness in the traditional sense as much as possible. However, in order to adapt to the changes in the consumer era, what literature brings is not the rebirth of literature, but the generalization, dwarfing and vulgarization of literature. Of course, these would be an optimistic conclusion based on Darwinism, because the fittest will survive and old literature will die, and a new literary form will be born, such as Internet literature and mobile phone literature. But I have always believed that culture and literature reject evolution. Therefore, it will be a blessing for human civilization to be able to preserve a traditional literary form intact.
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