Combine a classic literary work! Understanding of "Literature is the art of language"! ! Hurry up!

In a sense, language is the first element of literature, and it is best to start talking about literature by talking about literary language; To improve literary perception, we should start with improving language sense.

Language is really amazing, it can vividly express the colorful and endless inner world of human beings; You can get through the connection between literature and other art departments and present the beauty of pictures and music in your works; It can guide readers into the artistic conception of the work, re-create the work, and produce emotions ... Of course, it also has "shortcomings". It is only attractive to visual words or auditory sounds. It has no real pictures and sounds, and does not provide direct enjoyment of multiple senses. It is empty, it is ethereal. For people who don't know "this" language, they are sensitive to it. Let's start our journey of literature and language from the beautiful scenery.

First, how to understand that literature is the art of language?

"Literature is the art of language", perhaps you are familiar with this sentence, but how much do you know about the profound meaning of this simple sentence? Have you thought about the relationship between literature, language and art? This sentence can be extended from the following meaning:

Literature belongs to a branch of the art family.

Literature is an artistic style presented through language.

Language is a sign to draw a clear line between literature and non-literature.

Literature pursues the artistry and creativity of language.

From the perspective of literature and art, various styles in the literary family have their own unique existence and expression. According to the different media and rules they adopt, literature and art are usually divided into four different but interrelated categories: language art, plastic art, performing art and comprehensive art:

Language art: Literature reflects life, shapes images and expresses feelings with language.

Plastic Arts: Using art media such as color, line and modeling to create artistic images that people can directly feel, such as painting, sculpture and photography.

Performing arts: using the melody, rhythm or human movements of sound to create attractive auditory or visual artistic images, such as music and dance.

Comprehensive art: the comprehensive use of various artistic materials, artistic techniques and artistic laws to express artistic images on the stage, screen or screen, such as drama, film and television.

Gorky said: "The first element of literature is language. Language is the main tool of literature. Together with various facts and life phenomena, it constitutes the material of literature. " In other words, there is more than one kind of "literary material", but language is its most basic and essential material.

2. What are the main features of literary language?

Literary language is different from life language, scientific language, political language and official document language. Although it is more or less related to these languages, it has its own distinctive characteristics, which distinguish it from these languages.

1. Indirect

If we enlarge the concept of "language", we can say that painting uses the language of colors and lines, music uses the language of notes, melody and rhythm, and film and television uses the language of lens and montage ... These languages are all visible, audible and tangible, and the created image is direct. What about literary language? It is just a phonetic or literal symbol, not the image itself. Only through the visual acceptance of readers and the processing and transformation of the brain can we produce a sense of picture, body, sound, touch and taste in our hearts ... as Lu Xun saw at the beginning of writing My Hometown:

Since it is deep winter; As we approached our hometown, the weather was gloomy again. The cold wind blew into the cabin, and I looked out through the gap in the canopy. There were several desolate villages lying far and near, lifeless. I can't help feeling sad inside.

Here is the "picture" of language and writing, which becomes the medium of communication. Readers read the language and characters first, and then arouse the "picture sense" in their minds, resulting in a gloomy, dim and bleak impression of winter cold; If a painter or photographer reflects such a picture, it must be intuitive, and there is no need to use the medium that needs to be converted.

Indirectness brings fuzziness, uncertainty and polysemy to some extent, which seems to be the "weakness" of literary language, but it is also the strength of literary language. Because it leaves readers with infinite space for association and imagination, readers can fill the "blank" with their own life experiences and reading experiences, and everyone is immersed in their own unique reading experience. We often hear that "a thousand readers have a thousand Hamlets". No one regards it as a derogatory term, but as an important law of literature and appreciation activities.

Step 2 visualize

If indirectness reflects the general characteristics of language relative to other kinds of art, then visualization reflects the literary characteristics of language relative to other kinds of languages.

Clever writers and poets have the ability to describe people, objects and landscapes immediately and vividly. Not only that, they can also describe things with deep feelings and abstractions vividly. Look at Spring Breeze and Green Jiang Nanan, which arouses a kind of "visual sense" in readers' minds. The color of a "green" word has smudged the artistic conception of the whole painting and poem, which has been praised throughout the ages. Wang Guowei's "Words on Earth" said: "The branches of red apricots are noisy in spring", and the word "noisy" was written, and the realm was exhausted. "Clouds break through the moon to make a shadow", and with the word "de", the realm is exhausted. "This wonderful and refined word is not found in other languages, and it is also difficult for other art forms to express. Wang Guowei also said: "Ou Gong's" Die Lian Hua "is like a cloud, and it is difficult to reach. "Wang is quite talented, and he realized the" sound sense "in Ouyang Xiu's ci" Flourishing Flowers ",and sound is also a part of the image.

There is a secret here, that is, writers and poets should give full play to their thinking in images and try to use visualized words when writing. As Wang Li said, "Thinking in images is a literary problem as well as a linguistic problem. Thinking in images is conceived with concrete images. Language uses more concrete words and less abstract nouns. " "More concrete words and fewer abstract nouns" is the secret, which suggests an important direction for us to appreciate literature and write literature.

Literary language pursues visualization and sense of image, so that we often understand "visualized language" as "literary language".

Emotional

Emotion is another important embodiment of language literariness. Other languages, such as scientific language and official document language, describe and explain things with a rational and objective attitude, without expressing the speaker's emotional color; Literary language must express the author's feelings, but the degree of expression is high or low, and the expression methods are straight, hidden and obvious. Lyric works are very expressive. As for narrative works, as long as you observe them carefully, you can also capture the clues and threads of the author's emotional activities.

Looking back at the fragment of Hometown quoted earlier, the author added a sentence when describing the scenery: "My heart can't help feeling sad." Very directly expressed the inner feelings of "I". Even if the author doesn't say this sentence, it vaguely reflects the meaning of "sadness". You see, "there are several desolate villages in the yellow world, far and near, lifeless." Doesn't this also reveal a somewhat "sad" atmosphere? As Wang Guowei said in "The Thorn on Earth": "In the past, the discussion of poetry was divided into scenery language and emotional language. I don't know all the scenery but all the feelings. " It can be said that the language of all good literary works contains heavy "feelings".

Lao She has a deep understanding of this. He tells the key to a writer's use of language: "A work must have an emotional atmosphere. Emotional appeal is sad or exciting, and our language must be just enough to equip this kind of sadness or excitement. For example, if we want to convey sadness, we should choose some words that are not so strong and loud, which will make the sentence a little longer, because the tone is slow and the words are dim, which makes everyone feel sad. On the contrary, if we want to convey passionate feelings, we must use bright and strong language. " How do I learn a language? ) It can be seen that emotion and emotional appeal are the axes that dominate language activities, and language is the externalization of emotion and emotional appeal.

Third, how to understand the aesthetic features of China's literary language?

All languages in the world have their own unique beauty, and Chinese is no exception. To borrow the words of Mr. Wang Li, the beauty of Chinese includes the beauty of neatness, cadence and roundness. All these beauties are possessed by music and the result of language onomatopoeia, which can be called musical beauty. The beauty of China's music has existed since ancient times, and the excellent poems of the ancients can be sung and echoed in the ears. Unfortunately, today, with the gradual visualization of literary language acceptance, it has become weak. However, if we read carefully and listen attentively, we can also feel the beauty of all kinds of music in vernacular Chinese.

1. The beauty of neatness

Just as music has notes and paragraphs, any language has syllables and sentences. Ancient Chinese has a single syllable, and the pronunciation of each syllable is independent and similar, which creates conditions for the neat combination of syllables. A sentence consists of monosyllabic words. In this sentence, the front and back sounds may form similar syllables, such as "green, fat, red and thin" and "flying kites and jumping fish", each of which is symmetrical, forming a neat beauty. By extension, if two sentences are related in meaning, similar in words and similar in appearance, then this is a dual sentence; If there are more sentences on the basis of duality, they are parallelism sentences. Of course, parallelism does not require the same number of words, but only the same sentence pattern and the repetition of a single word. Duality and parallelism also reflect the musical beauty of language. Try this sentence:

Learning without thinking is useless, thinking without learning is dangerous. (The Analects of Confucius)-Duality

It is right to cite one side; Delete its secret and kill its young branches; Straighten it and suppress its anger ... (Gong Zizhen's "Sick Plum House")-parallelism

This kind of sentence has a sense of music and melody.

In fact, excellent vernacular Chinese also embodies the beauty of neatness, such as:

..... but the color is not strong, and the aftertaste will not last forever. Compared with Qiu Lai in the north, it's just yellow rice wine dried in vain, porridge steamed in white, perch white crab, yellow dog white camel. (Autumn in the Old Capital by Yu Dafu) —— Duality and parallelism

2. The beauty of rhythm

The four tones in Chinese are full of cadences, and the sentences composed of four tones have countless cadences. The so-called suppression means that the voice is short and has a falling tone; Yang refers to a long tone with a rising tone. So musicality, much like music. Our ancestors made a thorough and detailed study on the cadence law of ancient Chinese, and also brought the cadence beauty to the extreme. This is mainly reflected in the use of poetry. Try the following example:

Like a bright moon, the sea does not return, and the mood of missing you is like a faint cloud hanging over Yuntai Mountain. (Li Bai's "Cry and Shake the Balance")

Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping.

During the Three Kingdoms period, you made unparalleled achievements, and you gained a permanent reputation by invading. (Du Fu's Eight Arrays)

Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping Pingping.

Some of these words were read into the sound in ancient times and returned to the sound. Regardless of it, we can still read them according to today's pronunciation. When reading this kind of poem written in strict accordance with the law of leveling, we should pay attention to the change of the length and height of the voice. Flat and long, flat and short, can not only be close to the original rhythm requirements of ancient poetry, but also show the beauty of cadence, without completely sticking to the strict rules of the ancients.

In today's vernacular poetry and vernacular Chinese, the requirement of even words no longer exists, but the cadence beauty of Chinese still exists, which is only presented in modern form and becomes more rough and vague. For example:

Very fresh and natural, my hut is delicately located at a gentle angle on the ridge. (Li Lewei "I"

Just ordinary.

Very simple, very simple.

Castle in the air ")

First of all, these words are flat and uneven, creating a pleasant melody. Perhaps the author may not really "follow" the flat and even melody, but objectively it has the beauty of melody; Secondly, the first two symmetrical sentences are short, and then a long sentence of 19 is easy to read. So changeable and compact, it creates a new Chinese rhythm.

3. The beauty of loopback

The rhyme in poetry is somewhat similar to the melody cycle in music, which creates the musical beauty of language. Ancient Chinese rhymes, so do modern new poetry proverbs. The so-called rhyme is the repetition of the same vowel at the end of a sentence. The effect of rhyme on poetry is the beauty of roundness.

The rhyme of ancient poetry is obvious, for example, "No matter what 135 is, 246 is distinct", that is, the last word of 246 sentences must rhyme, but the rhyme of words is not necessarily like this, maybe every sentence rhymes, or three sentences rhyme; Flat phonology and phonology are separated, unlike now; There is also rhyme, which is unique in ancient poetry. Rusheng Modern Mandarin has disappeared, but it still remains in some dialects. The situation is more complicated, so there is no need to delve into it. It's enough to know that the last sentence rhymes. The disappearance of entering rhyme belongs to the phenomenon of "sound change", and the ancient sound is different from the present sound; Not only that, there are other rhymes. Modern people think that they don't rhyme, but they rhymed in ancient times. In a word, the rhyme of ancient poems is clear and the melody is beautiful, which brings great convenience to our reading.

The rhyme of ancient fu and prose is easy to be ignored and worth mentioning. Fu rhymes, and Han Fu is typical, so we seldom read it. For example, some sentences in the high school text Su Shi's Red Wall Rhyme:

My son and I are fishing on the river, making friends with fish, shrimp and elk, keeping a boat and keeping bottles for each other. It's a drop in the ocean to send a mayfly into the earth. Mourn a moment in my life and admire the infinity of the Yangtze River. Fly with the flying fairy, hold the bright moon, and grow up. I couldn't understand it at the moment, but I heard about it in Hengtai.

If you read it carefully, you can find that some ancient prose sometimes rhymes, such as Liu Zongyuan's Preface to Yuxi Poetry:

Sing a silly song about silly flow, you will be at a loss, will not violate, but will be confused and return to the original place. Super HarmonyOS system, mixed with foreigners, lonely but I don't know.

"Violation" rhymes with "return" and "foreign" rhymes with "knowledge". If you only read and don't read, it is not easy to detect rhyme; The more you read, the easier it is to read the charm.

Judging from the situation of modern literary language, the beauty of language cycle is not mainly manifested in rhyme, but in various forms with phrases and sentences as application units. It is also related to the neatness and beauty of sentences. For example, "Yellow rice wine dried up in vain ..." has both the beauty of neatness and the beauty of recycling. It also has a small circle word, which has its own sense of melody, such as "However, autumn in the north is particularly clear, particularly quiet and particularly sad." (Autumn in the Old Capital) The aforementioned "very fresh and natural" is also a small cycle.

Of course, the beauty of China's literary language is not limited to these three aspects. As long as we always keep in mind the belief that China's literary language is the most beautiful language, then we can appreciate the beauty of this language by reading the text in Chinese class and reading newspapers after class. When we usually talk, or talk, or talk, we will naturally show the beauty of this language.

Fourth, how to taste the language of literary works?

The language of literary works is the product of the painstaking efforts of writers and poets and the essence of human language. It has the characteristics of profundity, flexibility and variability, so readers can grasp it with challenges and a sense of accomplishment. On the one hand, they can explore and expand into the "deep zone" of meaning, meaning and rhyme indefinitely, on the other hand, there are many lawsuits and they can't convince the public. The goal of tasting such a language should be its deep meaning, implication and aesthetic effect. This kind of taste activity is different from learning practical language and learning a foreign language-it is biased towards grammar analysis, actual effect analysis and practical training, and is more about rational judgment and reasoning, and has nothing to do with emotion, beauty, association and imagination. Then, what aspects should be paid attention to in the language activities of appreciating literary works in middle school teaching?

1. Pay attention to the overall grasp.

The organic combination of syllables or characters of a language constitutes a "language field"; The language field of literary works is different from other language fields, and its strength and charm are far better than it. Therefore, to taste this language, we should have a good sense of wholeness or "sense of field". "Field" illuminates every detail and part of the work; Words and expressions in the works are defined and characterized by this "field". When they leave this "field", they will be restored to the dictionary and become language materials with only a single plane meaning.

For example, the word "sad" in the core sentence of "Autumn in the Old Capital" is something that everyone can hear, speak and write, and it has at least three meanings:

(1) Dictionary meaning: sad and desolate. (Modern Chinese Dictionary)

(2) Universal literary significance: deep feelings for the past or reality; The sadness of the scene; Complex feelings about life.

(3) The unique meaning of Autumn in the Old Capital: the author is full of ups and downs in his life journey, exhausted physically and mentally, and deeply sad; Watching autumn scenery evoke beautiful feelings and express a sense of beauty; The bitterness of life permeates into beautiful feelings, which is a mixture of beauty and bitterness.

The meanings of the three are expanded and concretized step by step, from single to polysemy. Moreover, due to the different personal circumstances of readers, there are more than 1000 subtle differences in the feelings of "sadness" in Yu Dafu's works.

Why can we taste so much content? This is due to the grasp of "article field" and "language field" in Autumn of the Old Capital, which embodies a cognitive certainty from macro to micro and from "face" to "point". Remember, this is the way to taste language.

2. Pay attention to microscopic analysis.

We should not simply "look down" from a strategically located building, but dive into the bottom of language streams and waves to see all the important subtle details of language "beauty". You need to cultivate your ability to interpret words and read sentences, and you need to be sensitive to language details.

For example, the title of Lu Xun's "Memories of Time Past" is intriguing. "Forgetting" and "recalling" are a pair of contradictions. How to combine them and highlight them as titles? It has various meanings: it reminds people of forgetfulness, it encourages the author to put down his mental burden and go into battle lightly, and it is angry with the reactionaries for "hiding" and "cheating". You can make a big article in one sentence.

This micro-analysis focuses on "fineness", works hard on the word "fineness" and sets requirements from "fineness". The author is a word, and the reader is a taste; The author may not be so, and the readers are filled with emotion.

3. Goal orientation is a deep meaning and aesthetic effect.

(1) Deep meaning: refers to text meaning and context meaning, not dictionary meaning and surface meaning. We should dig some well-known deep meanings of language, and dig some deep meanings that people ignore and suddenly see new ideas after meditation.

(2) Aesthetic effect: refers to the aesthetic feeling of the appreciator, which is a rational evaluation made after full cognition and understanding. Generally speaking, there are good reviews and few bad reviews. Many aspects are involved, such as the prudence and appropriateness of choosing words and making sentences, the richness and complexity of thoughts and feelings in words and sentences, the change of sentence length, the strangeness and creativity of word formation, the expressive effect of words and sentences in pronunciation, etc ... Remember, we should not only understand the original meaning of language, but also focus on the effect of "evaluation".

4. Ways to cultivate language taste ability.

When it comes to ways to cultivate the ability to taste language, you may say "read more" quickly, but what to read and how to read are the key and difficult points. Many middle school students love reading fashion literature and fashion works, but reject classic works, which is the deviation of learning language. Of course, fashionable works can be seen, and their language is close to yours, which is easy to be accepted and digested by you and can cultivate your sense of modern language. The classicality of classic works should include the classicality of language. It is the classic, essence and model of the national language, and it is the "gold" left after the big waves. It is difficult for you to "chew" and "digest" for a while because you are impetuous and haven't calmly sunk into the bottom of the work to capture these glittering things. Absolutely. After you read more classic works, your language literacy must be much richer and deeper than reading fashionable works.

When you read literary works, do you only pay attention to characters and story lines, or do you also pay attention to language expression? If it is a "pastime" mood, you can just read stories; If you have the purpose of "learning" in mind, you'd better set the reading goal comprehensively, including paying attention to the language expression of the work. Zhu Guangqian criticized some young people who "love reading" in the article "Reading Poetry to Cultivate Interest", saying: "So they read novels and plays, not asking about their artistic skills, but asking about interesting stories." Of course, Mr. Zhu is an active advocate of "artistic skills" including language skills. The starting point of reading is different, the results are different, and the level and advantages and disadvantages are clear. As a student, to learn Chinese well, we should take the taste of literary works as the focus and excitement, and never let go of any opportunity to train language sense and accumulate language materials.

You'd better have a special Collection of Literary Quotations and a Collection of Language Materials, record the good words and sentences in the text and extracurricular reading materials, make some comments, read them often and recite them aloud. Learning literary language is slow and you can't be lazy. It is not enough to read without recording. Many young writers and artists started writing by studying languages diligently, and writers and artists also experienced a long and meticulous process of language accumulation and tempering.