Definition of literature and art

Literature is the art of language (1). Literature shapes literary images with language and conveys aesthetic information with artistic images, which are the characteristics of all arts and are not unique to literature. Only in this way can we distinguish between art and non-art, but we cannot distinguish between literature and other art categories. In fact, when we talk about artistic image as a feature of literature, there is an implicit premise, that is, language is used as a medium and material to shape artistic image. Now let's start from this aspect and further explore the characteristics of literature. According to the different materials, media and means used to shape artistic images, art can be divided into plastic arts, performing arts, language arts and comprehensive arts. From this point of view, a remarkable feature that distinguishes literature from other kinds of art is that it uses language as a material to create artistic images. So Gorky said: "The first element of literature is language." "Language fixes all our impressions, feelings and thoughts and is the basic material of literature. Literature is a plastic art expressed in language. " The practice of literary creation shows that language is the only material for writers to embody aesthetic consciousness. His understanding, understanding and evaluation of life depend on language; He thinks artistically and breeds artistic images, but he can't completely leave the language; Finally, when he wants to express his inner aesthetic feelings and experiences, give it a material shell and turn it into an artistic image for others to appreciate, he can only rely on language. Therefore, people often refer to excellent writers as language masters and excellent literary works as treasures of language art. In these honorifics, apart from showing respect for writers, is there something amazing behind them? There seems to be. Mr Qian Gurong especially likes the language in Cao Yu's plays. Every time I read Mr. Cao Yu's plays, "there is always a kind and fresh feeling." His bright, beautiful, refined and vivid language often subtly brings me into an artistic world and gives me infinite joy. " Qian Gurong "often thinks that language may be the most magical of all human creations. Can't catch, can't touch, is nothing, but can be transformed into everything. As a Russian proverb says, language is not honey, but it can stick to everything. I'm afraid each of us has experienced a similar sense of surprise to varying degrees. When Mr. Qian read Cao Yu's works, he couldn't help being fascinated by the magic of his language. How to use language materials to create images and "speak" those "unspeakable" aesthetic feelings has become a key to literary creation. Here, the essence of contradiction is how to express the unique mood, color, artistic conception, verve and artistic conception of personal feelings with words with fixed meaning that everyone has, that is, how to transform social language into personal language, which can be said to be a mystery and principle in the use of literary language. According to the traditional point of view, the main means for literature to shape artistic images by language is description, that is, using various rhetorical devices to describe the shape and expression of the object as accurately, vividly and concretely as possible, and strive to achieve the degree of vividness, vividness and vividness. However, in fact, literature is not the only way to convey aesthetic feeling. Literature often plays the non-descriptive function of language, not only through words, but also attaches great importance to shaping artistic images with language sense, context and special sentence patterns, especially those with psychological images as the main form, in order to achieve the goal of perfectly expressing the aesthetic implication hidden in the deep heart. The use of language sense, context and special sentence patterns can promote the transformation from social language to personal language, and make the language often used and new. In this sense, it can be said that the existence of individual speech is the fundamental difference between literary language and non-literary language. (2) Basic Features of Language Art Although compared with other kinds of art, the language used by writers to create images is abstract in nature, it is a tool widely used in social communication, not just a medium belonging to literature, which brings a lot of inconvenience to writers to express their personal aesthetic consciousness. However, through the writer's creation, it is entirely possible for literature to turn the shortcomings of language into strengths and form the unique charm of language art, which is manifested in the following three characteristics of language art: 1, indirectness and iconicity of artistic image. (1) Indirect language is a symbol used by people to convey their thoughts and communicate their feelings, not a concrete form of the objective world. Therefore, reading literary works is obviously different from watching movies, plays, paintings, sculptures, dances and other artistic works. For these artistic works, the artistic image is substantial and can directly affect people's senses. People can feel them directly through sight, hearing and touch. Literature is different. The artistic image created by language cannot be directly presented to people. Only on the premise of understanding language can people perceive and grasp the artistic image in literary works by imagining, associating and mobilizing their own life experiences. Li Bai's poem "Sailing alone far across the sky, only the Yangtze River flows in the sky" is often praised as "picturesque". But for illiterate children and foreigners who don't know Chinese, he can only see a bunch of abstract symbols printed on white paper, and he can't feel these two poems through the intermediary of language, so there is no picturesque image at all. If the scenery described in the poem is photographed or photographed and painted into a picture, the situation is different. Therefore, as an art of language, the artistic image in literature can only exist indirectly through imagination, and the indirectness of image is a prominent feature of literature. When talking about literary image, we have emphasized that it must be tangible, but the image in literature has become an indirect existence because of the intermediary role of language. This is obviously a contradiction. The solution of this contradiction first depends on the characteristics of human psychological activities, that is, "human appearances are often associated with words and phrases", "past experience is always maintained in the form of appearances and phrases, and memory is always carried out by means of appearances and phrases at the same time. "Language can evoke corresponding images and create a sense of image, thus helping literary images to realize concrete sensibility. Secondly, it depends on whether the language of literary works can stimulate readers' imagination and association, and provide a broad space for readers' re-creation. At this time, the language description of literary works is too abstract and concrete. It is better to describe a beautiful woman with "peerless beauty", "soft skin" and "eyebrows like green feathers and muscles like snow" than with "clever smile and beautiful eyes" and "if she just turns her head and smiles, there are hundreds of spells", because the former is either too abstract to cause corresponding appearances or too specific to limit association and imagination; The latter, by capturing the features of expression instantly, leaves room for imagination, allowing the reader to pour his life experience, aesthetic taste and aesthetic ideal into his feelings, thus forming a more vivid and concrete sense of image for him. (2) The concrete sensibility of literary psychological image is based on indirectness, which can only exist with the help of imagination, which is different from the sensibility of other works of art. For other kinds of art, artistic image is real, while artistic image in literature can only exist in people's imaginary world. In this sense, literary images are also artistic images in broad psychological images. This is a meaning of literary image. Another meaning of the psychological function of literary images is narrow. Because literary image has the characteristics of indirect existence in literature, literature can also turn an unformed psychological image into a literary image. This often appears in poetry. The specific sensibility is embodied in the specific description of the individual psychological activities of the characters. It is difficult to create an artistic image of this psychological image by presenting one's own artistic type with an intuitive artistic image. Psychological iconicity is another feature of literary images. As the characteristics of literature, the indirectness and iconicity of images have both disadvantages and advantages. To appreciate literary works, we should not only know the language used to create images, but also have considerable life experience, cultural literacy and image thinking ability. A Farewell to Meng Haoran on the way to Yangzhou by the Yellow Crane Tower is interpreted as a friend sailing eastward, getting farther and farther, and finally disappearing, which cannot be regarded as a real understanding of the poem. If you can't feel the meaning: the meaning of love is longer than the surging river; Melancholy caused by the departure of friends, and so on, what are the image feelings and aesthetic implications to talk about? Therefore, the realization of the aesthetic value of literary images is often more restricted than other art forms. This is the short board of literature. But on the other hand, it is precisely the power of literature. The indirectness and iconicity of literary images induce readers' thinking in images, let readers' imagination gallop freely, and need and encourage readers' creation, so their expressive force far exceeds the artistic images directly presented. Although the process of directly acting on people's sensory image with a certain physical representation is intuitive and easy to understand, people's feelings from it are often limited to the image itself, which greatly affects people's understanding of the inner meaning of artistic works, while literary images indirectly existing in the form of psychological images have no such certainty. Readers can and must supplement and enrich it with imagination in the process of acceptance, and realize the aesthetic realm of "endless words and endless meanings" 2. Show the vastness and profundity of life. (1) extensiveness Because the artistic image in literary works is not intuitive, but appeals to the reader's imagination and re-creation through the intermediary of language, the content reflected by literature is hardly limited by time and space, subjective and objective conditions, thus making literature more extensive and profound in showing life and exploring people's psychological world than other art types can. When talking about this, Hegel once said: "The art of language is far broader than other arts in content and expression. Every kind of content, all spiritual and natural things, events, actions, plots, internal and external situations can be incorporated into poetry and visualized through poetry. " The "poetry" he said here is poetry in a broad sense, that is, literature. In other words, literature describes almost everything, whether it is the micro-world in life, such as fleeting thoughts and feelings; Or the macro world in life, such as the great historical changes of an era and a society, literature can be vividly and concretely expressed through artistic images shaped by language. As for using artistic images to reflect complicated social relations and express profound and huge historical content, it is even more non-literature. Such as Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Les Miserables, War and Peace, etc., not only touched all aspects of social life at that time, but also vividly showed the inner world of the characters, which was almost impossible for other art departments, such as painting, sculpture, music and dance. Although film and television art has strong expressive ability, due to various conditions, when they put these literary works on the screen or screen, they have to give up some characters and plots, which reduces the capacity of the original literature more or less. (2) Profound literature shows that the profundity of life is inseparable from its extensiveness. When literature depicts various artistic images in a broad life background, it also objectively produces a specific life process. Gorky said that literature "should try its best to show people in constant movement, people in action, people in endless conflicts and people in the struggle of classes, groups and individuals." Therefore, the performance of literature on the process of life is not only reflected in the continuation of time and the vastness of space, that is, the vastness of life, but also reproduces the causes and consequences of various contradictions in life. Readers can see the history of character formation, the thread of ideological development and the opportunity of emotional transformation. Literature reflects the profundity of life and is contained in these contents. Because the profundity of literature is nothing more than the manifestation of objective laws hidden under the phenomenon of life and the revelation of internal psychological reasons of life contradictions. For example, in Water Margin, if the author Shi Naian doesn't write about the tortuous life experiences and changes in thoughts and feelings of Lin Chong and He Lu before they went up the mountain to become grass, the novel can't profoundly reveal the inevitability of "forcing them to go to Liangshan", and the description of these heroes' rebellious characters is superficial. It shows that only literature, the art of time, can reflect the profound social and historical content through the concrete expression of life process, while other arts are obviously difficult to reach such a level. Painting and sculpture should generally show the static state of life, and time solidifies into a specific space; Although dance and music can also express the process, they are the media used to shape the artistic image, such as sound, rhythm, melody, movement, body and so on. , can't carry more historical content, so they often can only symbolically reproduce social life. (3) the complexity and subtlety of expressing thoughts and feelings. Marx and Engels pointed out in German Ideology: "Language is the direct reality of thought." Language is closely related to human thinking activities and is the main tool for human to express thoughts and feelings. Therefore, literature, as a language art, is more suitable to reflect the complete process and specific content of people's ideological and emotional activities than other arts. On the one hand, literature can use language to create artistic images and express those unspeakable or unspeakable psychological feelings as much as possible; On the other hand, literature can directly use the language itself, make use of the fact that language is the direct reality of thoughts, convey those thoughts that only language can accurately express, and show the process of thinking activities. In this sense, literature seems to have two kinds of media and means to convey information, which can make the expression of thoughts and feelings not only vivid and delicate, but also profound and complicated. This feature greatly enriches the expressive force of literature on thoughts and feelings, and makes literature overcome the limitations of other arts to some extent due to the intuition of images and the singleness of expression media, and become the most thoughtful art form. For example, Acheng wrote at the end of Chess King that "I" slept on the stage in the audience after witnessing Wang Yisheng's chess game and thought, "I am not a layman, how do I know it is so fun?" The family is ruined, and the flat head is hoed every day, but it has its own real life inside. Knowing is luck and happiness. Food and clothing is the foundation, and human beings have their own, which is what they are busy with every day. I can be trapped inside, and it's not very human in the end. "It is through rational language that the theme of the novel is pointed out, so that readers can gain a more universal and far-reaching understanding of the meaning of life from this chess story and strengthen the aesthetic implication of the work. This fact shows that literature can fully express rich and profound rational thoughts and convey the subjective evaluation of writers in various forms, which is more rational than other art forms. Literature can also directly show the inner activities of characters at multiple levels and angles through various artistic means. This is also an important reason why literature can express complex and subtle thoughts and feelings. In the tenth chapter of the novel Heavy Wings, Zhang Jie describes the first encounter between Zheng Yuanyuan and Mo Zheng, which fully shows this feature: "I will come to see you at 7: 30 every night." Zheng Yuanyuan couldn't figure out why he gave orders to people he met for the first time. She is somewhat aware of her willfulness and coquetry. God, why? She has never been willful and coquettish to any boy. This is a bit special, isn't it? This is equivalent to her giving Mo A Zheng a kind of strength, a unique strength. With what? His male self-esteem and reserve? Her waist can still feel the strength of that big hand when she fell down just now. Terrible, terrible. Is she too frivolous? She immediately put a straight face and her voice became cold. She turned away from Mo Zheng and said to Ye Zhiqiu, "Aunt Ye, I'm leaving. "Because this description not only has the author's narration from an objective angle, but also shows the external characteristics of the characters: language, action, expression and tone, and indirectly analyzes Zheng Yuanyuan's psychological state; Through the subjective consciousness activities of the characters themselves, even some subconscious activities, she directly shows her inner world, vividly and delicately showing a girl's complicated and subtle psychology in front of a young man who meets for the first time. The above characteristics of literature endow literature with strong expressive force, making literature the most important form to convey aesthetic consciousness and occupying a prominent position in the whole art field. Therefore, people often refer to literature and other arts as "literary art". Of course, all kinds of arts have their own characteristics and strengths, which are irreplaceable by other arts. In order to emphasize the characteristics of literature, we take its advantages to places beyond the power of other art types, and never think that literature is omnipotent and can override other arts. In fact, it is precisely because all kinds of art have their own special fields in the aesthetic world that other art forms can't set foot in, so human beings have created a variety of art categories. People can appreciate a complete aesthetic world only in the complementarity of various arts. To sum up, we can define literature as a form of aesthetic consciousness in which writers shape artistic images with the help of language to express their aesthetic feelings and understanding of life.