Abstract: As a sociological concept,“grass roots” ought have nothing to do with “pure literature”. But viewing it from the retroanalytic angle of the mentality, the uncorelation between literature and society is the very product of literary conception, which took shape in the middle of 1980 and became increasingly narrower afterwards.In a certain sense, their established corelationship will enable the “pure literature”, which is being hypostatized day by day, to release new senses, and under the new historical conditions, to obtain its ethical, political and social nature that it formerly insisted on discarding.

Key words: grass roots, pure literature, literary autonomy, social nature, ethical nature