“The Spirit of the Lunar Calendar” and the Sustainable Development of Mankind:An Answer to the Questions fromShanghai Culture
Guo Wenbin
As the time system of the Chinese nation, the lunar calendar pays more attention to balance, harmony, integrity and systematization than the solar calendar and farming calendar, of which the resulting political system, moral system, ethical system and cultural system determine people’s cognitive mode, thinking mode, behavior mode and academic mode. For thousands of years, the initiative of astronomy and humanity has gradually evolved into folk customs, especially festival customs. Through traditional festivals, culture can be inherited with mechanism and guarantee. Folk custom is not only an effective carrier to cultivate people’s cultural consciousness, but also a poetic force to successfully coordinate astronomy and humanity and effectively save politics, economy, culture and ecology. The spirit of the lunar calendar is of great practical significance to the sustainable development of mankind.
Global Network Era of “Creative City”:Culture and Economy of Kanazawa, a Creative City of UNESCO
SASAKI Masayuki (trans. by Li Yanli)
The movement of developing creative city has ushered in a prosperous period after 2000. The rebirth strategy of European and American cities has been concretely carried out, and the whole world including Asia and developing countries has followed suit in an extensive situation. In 2004, the creative city network proposed by UNESCO has achieved epoch-making historical significance at home and abroad. Now, the creative city is facing a global network era. As a social experimental center where new attempts are accumulating and successful cases of sustainable development are achieved, Kanazawa, the creative city of UNESCO, has become the first recognized city in the field of handicrafts. This mediumsized city has its own unique economic foundation and maintains a balance between economic development, culture and environment. Its biodiversity and cultural diversity have been highly appraised.
The Symbolic Concepts and Main Platform For the Overseas Promotion of Chinese Culture
Huang Kaifeng, Xu Rui
To urge the effective implementation of the strategy of the overseas promotion of Chinese culture, we need to further explain and refine the symbolic concepts of the overseas promotion of Chinese culture, and also further elaborate researches into its communication platform. We should take “to be harmonious but different”, “fairness and justice” and “community of shared future of mankind” as the symbolic concepts which can reflect Chinese civilization of five thousand years, as the core value of socialism with Chinese characteristics and the integration of Chinese and Western civilization. As the mainstream platforms built by the government, such as Confucius Institute, overseas Chinese cultural center and world Sinology forum, have strong leadership and influence, these platforms should be precisely positioned and classified to give full play to their leading role and unique advantages in promoting Chinese culture overseas.
Jiangnan’s Cultural Tradition and the Cultural Construction of Shanghai
Yang Jianlong
Jiangnan has different geographical categories in different historical periods. Today’s Jiangnan includes roughly the Yangtze River Delta region of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Shanghai. The culture of Jiangnan has generally formed a pragmatic and rational pioneering spirit, open and inclusive innovation spirit, exquisite and gentle aesthetic spirit and other characteristics. In the course of its development and prosperity, Shanghai has always been closely related to the development of Jiangnan’s culture which has become the background of Shanghai’s cultural development with a distinctive feature of metropolitan culture. When exploring the connection between the culture of Jiangnan and Shanghai, we must explain the concepts of Jiangnan culture, Shanghai culture and the culture of Shanghai style respectively and their relationship. We should also analyze the planning and status quo of Shanghai’s cultural construction and development, and explore the shortcomings and ideas of Shanghai cultural construction, in an effort to make Shanghai a truly outstanding global city and a global civilized city.
On Teng Gu’s Reference to & Development of Croce’s Aesthetic Thoughts
Jiang Zhihui
As the founder of Chinese modern art history and art discipline, Teng Gu devotes his whole life to the introduction of western literary aesthetics and thoughts of art history, making remarkable contributions to the transformation of Chinese literary aesthetics and art history from traditional to modern. Croce, an Italian aesthetician, is the first Western aesthetician to be introduced by Teng Gu to China when he studies in Japan. His expressionism of “art is intuition” and his thoughts on knowledge classification and art independence are of guiding significance to the formation of Teng Gu’s art thoughts such as Teng Gu’s ideas of the independence of art science, the writing of art history based on art styles and the formation of “moving and organized” art essence view all having traces of Croce’s aesthetic thoughts. On the basis of drawing on and absorbing Croce’s art aesthetic thoughts, Teng Gu pays attention to the excavation and interpretation of Chinese traditional literature and art aesthetic idea, which promotes the modern transformation for Chinese traditional art aesthetic ideas.
On the Dual Meanings of Beauty inThe Chuang-TzuAnd on the Controversy of Relativism in Aesthetics ofThe Chuang-Tzu
Zhu Songmiao
There are two types of beauty inThe Chuang-Tzu: the beauty in material world where beauty is unreasonable and the beauty in the world of Tao where beauty is absurd. From the view of Tao,The Chuang-Tzunegates the artificial beauty could surpass the natural beauty in the world of things. On this basis, it holds that the beauty of Tao is a kind of great beauty, which is defined by “Wu”. Its negative expression is the beauty of speechless, of ignorance, of inaction, and of uselessness, etc, while its positive expression is the beauty of simplicity, wateriness, silence and so on. This is because Tao is defined by “Wu” instead of “You”, and simplicity, wateriness, silence and so on are the nature of Tao and all things,while the beauty is just the perfect realization, manifestation and completion of its nature. Therefore,The Chuang-Tzuemphasizes the real or great beauty is defined by Wu. On the other hand, Aesthetics ofThe Chuang-Tzuis quite different from the relativism.
Rethinking Heidegger’s Interpretation of Van Gogh’s Painting “Shoes”
Li Chuang
InThe Origin of Art Works, Heidegger questions the attribution of shoes in Van Gogh’s paintings, but he still insists that it is a pair of shoes of female farmers. According to his poetic thoughts, “female farmers” refers to human as well as a metaphor for the sun, and the art works is showed as an integration of the heavens, the earth, human being, and the gods. This is what he calls “truth” and his understanding of Kant’s “selfphysical”, that is, the super-sensing matrix. Several of his fine art works all embody this feature. As such, we could have a clearer understanding of Heidegger’s existential art thoughts and the controversy about “agricultural shoes”.
Cognition and Aesthetic Reflection under the Influence of New Digital Media
Chen Zhengyong
New digital media has changed not only the way of people’s life, but also the way of people’s perception and cognition. Moreover, it has deconstructed and reconstructed people’s aesthetic ideas. Human beings seem to live in an integrated space-time in an era of fast social change,rapid growth of information and short cycle of knowledge renewal. If people still use the pre-electronic models of fragmented time and space to think, and pass judgement on today’s aesthetic activities and concepts with the aesthetic ideas of the mechanical age or even the agricultural age,they will obviously find there is a huge gap. This paper introduces the theory of the extended relationship between the media and human beings,and explains the influence of new digital media on people’s cognition and aesthetic transformation from the perspective of cognitive style, data doctrine, visual schema, reading model and the aesthetic mirage of consumption.
Zheng Sixiao’s Influence on the literati of Songjiang
Chen Fukang
Zheng Sixiao is a famous patriotic poet and painter in Jiangnan during Song and Yuan Dynasties. He lived in Hangzhou and Suzhou, not far from Songjiang, Shanghai. He has friends in Songjiang. His most famous book,History of the Mind, is found and published at the end of Ming Dynasty, and immediately spread in Songjiang. Zheng Sixiao’s paintings and poems, especially his bookHistory of the Mind, have a great influence on the literati of Songjiang.
The Rhetoric of the Feeling in Western Material Culture:OnA New Study of Travelling Notesby Qian Zhongshu
Zhang Zhi
The “New Study of TravellingNotes”, whose contents and visions are closely related to the development of modern Chinese literature to a large extent, is a new category of knowledge produced by overseas travel writing in the late Qing Dynasty. Qian Zhongshu, while planing to write a small book on the introduction of Western literature into the late Qing Dynasty, has a unique interest in this part of the materials, focusing on the“new feeling” in the poetry and prose comparison, which seems to have a great inspiration to today’s study on the details of history and literature.This paper attempts to sort out and further expounds the scattered materials through his published works andThe Collection of Manuscriptsphotocopied and published after his death.
Everything I Never Told Youand The Concept of Interracial Family Education
Zeng Lihua
The novelEverything I Never Told Youby Chinese American writer Wu Qishi tells the tragedy of a Chinese-American ethnic family. The character defect of Chinese James’s inferiority leads to the deviation of his father’s role, the difference of the couple’s concept of values leads to the breakdown of the family relationship, and Lydia satisfies her parents’ hope at the cost of giving up herself. Through a psychological analysis of Lydia’s forbearance and expectation of her parents’ stress, the paper points out the complexity and difficulties of family education in the context of cross-ethnic cultural conflicts.
Qiao Yi Game as a Systematic Structure: A Respond to Fan Jin and Du Xinyuan
Ye Jun
In response to Professor Fan Jin and Professor Du Xinyuan’s discussion on the study of Qiao Yi, this paper points out that Qiao Yi does have a holistic intention, but only tries to find an operable way to cut into the world that has been too fragmented by disciplinary branches. It tries to transcend the binary opposition of “scientific system versus human system”, putting an emphasis on a larger system, namely the so-called “Tao”,or the dimension of “knowledge fusion”, and then put forward a proposition of Qiao Yi game as a systematic structure, trying to learn from the spirit of German scholars, which could not only follow basic rules but also keep open and creative, not only start from the micro, but also take an overall view. Moreover, it could not only “see something important from a small clue” and “set rules on empirical methods”, but also “see micro variations from universal principles”, not only control but also surpass “grand narrative”.
The Communication on Poetry by Ye Jiaying and Xu Peijun
Sun Qin’an
Ye Jiaying and Xu Peijun are not only well-known in the academic circles for their research and management of Ci, but also good at writing poems. Both of them keep a communicative relationship in reading and writing of Ci and poetry for more than 20 years, through which this paper describes their endless academic pursuit and their deep acquaintance with and love for each other.