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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
A Critique Of Derrida's Deconstructive Mode Of Thinking, Bing Li
A Critique Of Derrida's Deconstructive Mode Of Thinking, Bing Li
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Despite of misunderstanding, deconstruction as a kind of way of thinking has inserted profound influence in the late 20th century. Derrida's undermining of the dualistic way of thinking may not be taken as an irrational destruction, but as a rigorously logical analysis. The heterogeneous way of thinking contains two important perspectives of time and otherness. Derrida's cross-disciplinary writing implicates a post-modern thought of dedifferentiation, which further complicates the boundaries between arts. However, the main limitation of Derrida's mode of thinking lies in its reductionist way of thought, in which language is reduced to super subject and the author's authority is …
Clearing A Path To China: A Probe Into Hall And Ames' Methodology Of Sino-Western Cultural Comparison, Yunhua Liu
Clearing A Path To China: A Probe Into Hall And Ames' Methodology Of Sino-Western Cultural Comparison, Yunhua Liu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
This paper focuses on the trilogy of comparative study of Sino-Western thought co-authored by David L. Hall and Roger T. Ames to make a critical survey of their methodology of cultural comparison. This paper regroups the barriers Hall and Ames find to be in urgent want of clearing and then it briefly describes and interprets the rationale behind the four groups. The paper proceeds to summarize the two scholars' neo-pragmatic concept of cultural comparison before analyzing the implications of their concept of determinants in culture and contextualized approach in relation to the two different frameworks of problematization in the two …
Environmental Civility: Culture, Education, Enlightenment, And Wisdom, Sepänmaa Yrjö
Environmental Civility: Culture, Education, Enlightenment, And Wisdom, Sepänmaa Yrjö
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Culture and civility, enlightenment and wisdom all relate to the environment, and the environment relates to them. Environmental civility is a conscious and emotional skill or readiness, which permits a basically positive attitude and way of acting. Civility and wisdom are close to each other and nearly synonyms. Knowledge is the foundation, but it needs the partnership of an attitude that maintains and refines life. Civility is value-positive, but as such also critical. It means proper respect and appreciation of well-done work, and always seeking something better. Eco-humanism emphasizes the positive value of humankind and human work, positive footprints: we …
Modernity, The Avant-Garde And Mass Culture: A Reflection Inspired By Walter Benjamin, Yong Wang
Modernity, The Avant-Garde And Mass Culture: A Reflection Inspired By Walter Benjamin, Yong Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Walter Benjamin's meditation on modernity is the most significant in his theory, and his concept of aura apparently illuminates the transformation from traditional art toward modern one but essentially reveals the characteristics of popular culture as integration and formularization. His interpretation of the tragic drama, Baudelaire, Kafka, and Proust further exposes the nature of the avant-garde as a form going beyond the content. This illumination depicts two cultural patterns of modernity: discontent with reality that leads to injection of rationality into reality, and identification with reality that leads to acknowledge the random meaning from reality. These two patterns comprise the …
Benjamin In Love: A Re-Interpretation OfMoscow Diary, Shicong Sun
Benjamin In Love: A Re-Interpretation OfMoscow Diary, Shicong Sun
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Benjamin's Moscow Diary records the complex relationship between the life and the thought, and it also penetrated with his self-projection. Neither is Benjamin in love a symbol of the "Benjamin industry" carnival, nor is the bodiless Benjamin a feminist metaphor for the aura of his thoughts. Asja Lacis, the protagonist in Moscow Diary, represents one immanent origin of philosophical critique of modernity in the era of overflowing total alienation and pseudo-experience. Individual's authentic experience has been viewed by Benjamin as the last resort to transcendence and redemption of modernity, and underlying Moscow Diary is Benjamin's philosophy of experience.
The Enigma Of Visibility: Merleau-Ponty's Philosophical Reflection On Painting In Eye And Mind, Yaojun Zhang
The Enigma Of Visibility: Merleau-Ponty's Philosophical Reflection On Painting In Eye And Mind, Yaojun Zhang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Merleau-Ponty's Eye and Mind focuses on painting, but underlying the discussion in the book is the relationship between man and existence, as visuality is the sinew for the relationship. This paper proceeds from the discussion in Eye and Mind and investigates the basic characteristics of visuality before continues to analyze the reversible relationship between man and objects which the paper defines as the relationship between the visible and the invisible. The paper maintains that it is possible to approach existence by way of painting.
Cleanth Brooks's Theory Of Fiction And His Critical Practice, Feiliang Fu, Shunqing Cao
Cleanth Brooks's Theory Of Fiction And His Critical Practice, Feiliang Fu, Shunqing Cao
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Cleanth Brooks' critical study on fiction, especially on William Faulkner's, is a remarkable achievement. Brooks claimed that there is no essential difference between fiction criticism, poetry criticism and drama criticism. In fiction criticism, Brooks' emphases remain on textual skills such as irony, paradox and symbol, taking fiction as an organism that should be independent of the social life and political propaganda, and opposing Romantic sentimentalism. Nevertheless, Brooks also lay great weight to the historical context and geographical environment of an author, emphasizing the influence of an author's life experience and entire body of works on a particular fiction, and attaching …
Franco Moretti's Reconstructionist "New Theory Of Literary Evolution" And World Literary History, Yuping Wu, Hanwen Fang
Franco Moretti's Reconstructionist "New Theory Of Literary Evolution" And World Literary History, Yuping Wu, Hanwen Fang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
This paper claims that Franco Moretti's "New Theory of Literary Evolution" as one of the subjectivity theories behind the reconstruction of world literature history could be viewed as the reproduction in the postindustrial era of the evolution theory of literature in the 19th-century West. Although Darwin's evolution theory had profound impacts in the Western theory of social sciences, its limitations in epistemology and methodology have long been exposed and challenged. Moretti's plot-style interaction proposition takes into consideration formalist theory and the Western theory of world system, trying to reconstruct an innovative theory of world literature. The paper concludes that Moretti's …
Marx And The Problems Of 20th Century Aesthetics, Zhenglong Wang
Marx And The Problems Of 20th Century Aesthetics, Zhenglong Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Marx's shift of focuses first from the essence of beauty to the formation of beauty and then from the relationship between art, society and life to the liberation feeling and sensibility undermines the traditional aesthetics from the metaphysical aspect and promotes the liberation of sensibility in the 20th-century aesthetics. Marx's political economy reveals various contradictions of capitalist industrial civilization and constructs a perspective of critique and methodology to analyze the capitalist culture, which establishes the foundation for the socio-cultural turn of criticism in the 20th-century aesthetics. The relations dealt with in Marx's aesthetics have been developed, revised, and questioned or …
On Heidegger, Jameson Fredric, Yu Zhu
On Heidegger, Jameson Fredric, Yu Zhu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Heidegger's Being and Time could be considered as a project in which the translation of codes occupies a central place. As for the dialectical oppositions between "the ontic" and "the ontological", "authenticity" and "inauthenticity" etc. and the ultimate failure of translation of codes induced by the analysis of "Dasein", these conceptual operations could be grasped as a "language experiment". It is only through this movement of "transcoding" that we could approach the historical specificity of Heidegger's thought and understand his political commitment and ideological significance of his philosophical discourse.
What Are The Consequences Of Literary Theory? Regarding To Stanley Fish's Non-Consequentialist Concept, Houliang Chen
What Are The Consequences Of Literary Theory? Regarding To Stanley Fish's Non-Consequentialist Concept, Houliang Chen
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Literary theories have been long believed to have consequences. On the one hand, changes may be brought about in our reading experience and critical practices, and reforms may occur on the other. An entirely different argument, however, is raised by Stanley Fish, who claims that theory has no consequence because of its vain attempts to guide practice while taking a transcendental gesture so as to acquire a general hermeneutics of text from an absolutely impartial viewpoint. Literary theory is, therefore, a descriptive act of interpretation at best instead of an act of interpretation; hence, it cannot bring about any practical …
Le Cinéma Comme Expérimentation Philosophique, Badiou Alain, Yang Li
Le Cinéma Comme Expérimentation Philosophique, Badiou Alain, Yang Li
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Badiou starts with three concrete situations and proposes that the mission of philosophy lies in thinking about choice, distance and exception. As cinema creates a new synthesis from ruptures, it becomes an experimentation of philosophical situation. Philosophy can reveal the implications of the cinema from five differents dimentions: image, experience of time, continuity, order of the arts and art/non-art. Cinema doesn't deny difference, but construct a new relation out of heterogeneous relations between different art forms, constructed time and real duration, forms of popular culture, models of grand moral conflicts, and between love and politics, etc. Cinema is an absolutely …
Mutiple Faces Of "The Other", Yamin Hu, Xiang Xiao
Mutiple Faces Of "The Other", Yamin Hu, Xiang Xiao
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
"The other" is one of the most important key words in contemporary Western literary criticism. This paper puts the term in context and explores its different uses and connotations in Plato and Hegel's philosophy, phenomenology-existentialism, post-structuralism as well as in postcolonial criticism and feminism. The paper points out that "the other" is a relational concept and exists in two groups of relationships. One is the relation between the One/Same and the Other, and the other is the relation between the Self/Subject and the Other. The latter may be the specific display of the former. "The other" has three closely connected …
On Benjamin's Critical Model Of "Aestheticization Of Politics" Via An Analysis Of Italian Futurism, Yun Zhou
On Benjamin's Critical Model Of "Aestheticization Of Politics" Via An Analysis Of Italian Futurism, Yun Zhou
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In the epilogue of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", Walter Benjamin developed a critical model of "aestheticization of politics" in which Italian Futurism is criticized as fascism, which has resulted in heated debates on the relationship between the avant-garde and fascism. This paper attempts to revisit Benjamin's critical model of "aestheticization of politics" by describing and analyzing the context of modernity in which the model is formed in hope of disclosing Benjamin's insights into modernity. The paper tries to justify the model's critical effectiveness for the avant-garde and the contemporary culture. The paper then proceeds …
Out Of "The Prison Of The Self": Maurice Blanchot On Death, Literature And "The Other", Lingling Zhu
Out Of "The Prison Of The Self": Maurice Blanchot On Death, Literature And "The Other", Lingling Zhu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Since Descartes' cogito-based subject construction, the subject has operated within the framework of self-identity and the mine-ness of experience. Henceforth, the subject has built a complicated "prison of the self" with means such as understanding, representation and practical activities. In this prison, the "I" can only encounter other individuals or objects through the perception and reason of the "I", which means that the "I" can only encounter with "the self of the 'I'". By analyzing death, literature and the other, Blanchot revealed that there is a dimension of I-less embedded in the self of the "I," and that the subject …
What Is The Time Of Contemporary Art?, Rancière Jacques
What Is The Time Of Contemporary Art?, Rancière Jacques
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Instead of opposing the glorious – or utopian – age of artistic and political modernism to the disenchanted age and the parodic forms of contemporary postmodernism, it seems more fruitful to distinguish between two ways of being contemporary to its own time. What did it mean for art to be contemporary in the age of Tatlin or Vertov? What does it mean for the artists of the beginning of the 21st century? How does each of those two forms of "contemporary art" deal with time and with the relation of time to space? How does that relation between time and …
The Essentialist And Anti-Essentialist Features In Gates' Literary Theory, Yanli He
The Essentialist And Anti-Essentialist Features In Gates' Literary Theory, Yanli He
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Gates' literary theory is a hybridity of anti-essentialism and essentialism, which shows in three aspects. First, he maintains a non-essentialist concept of race, to speak for the black people with an identity based on African origin. Second, his key criterion for black literature is the form of text and the author' DNA embedded in the text with unidentified author's racial identity. The form creates formal lines of continuity between the texts which constitute the shared text of blackness. As not all novels have formal connection with other Black texts, Gates has to find their authors' identity to prove their black …
The Meta-Ethical Traits: Nothingness, Différance And Spectrology, Hongsheng Wang
The Meta-Ethical Traits: Nothingness, Différance And Spectrology, Hongsheng Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
One of the foremost problems that contemporary narrative ethics must respond to is whether meaning exists. This paper reviews the different Western versions of the death of God and the various understandings of "nothingness" among Chinese and Western thinkers, attempts to distinguish "nothingness" from "nihilism", and hopes to pin down the location of the meaning formation from multiple perspectives. It proceeds to investigate Derrida's "différance" and "spectrology" and positions deconstructionism in the meta-ethical dimension of post-philosophical thinking. The paper has also summarized the basic features of the meta-ethical dimension.
The Return Of Beauty?, Welsch Wolfgang
The Return Of Beauty?, Welsch Wolfgang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
This paper argues that the so-called return of beauty propagated in the aesthetic discourse is actually a return of the topic "beauty." The paper puts forward three claims in support of the argument. 1) The opposition to beauty that we find in art theory from mid-nineteenth century onward and especially in the twentieth century was not directed against beauty in general, but against specific conceptions of beauty. 2) Contemporary pleas in favor of beauty have dubious reasons and effects. 3) The talk about the attractiveness of the beautiful or the sublime, breath-taking beauty and its universality is conspicuously absent from …
Theoretical Traces Of Raymond Williams' "Structures Of Feeling" And "Cultural Materialism", Jifang Duan
Theoretical Traces Of Raymond Williams' "Structures Of Feeling" And "Cultural Materialism", Jifang Duan
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
"Structures of Feeling" is an important concept in Raymond Williams' aesthetic theory of "Cultural Materialism", and it is the starting point of his Marxist aesthetics and underlies the different stages of his theoretical development. The concept of "the structure of feeling" provides both an anchor point for retrospective criticism on his cultural materialism aesthetics and a point of departure for delineating the trajectory of his theoretical development and implications. The paper advocates a close reading of theory as it may provide an important approach to understand Williams' Marxist cultural theory as that it represents a way to break away from …
Critique Of Foucault's Theory Of Discourse, Xian Zhou
Critique Of Foucault's Theory Of Discourse, Xian Zhou
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
"French theory" is another expression for the post-structuralist thought in France, with Foucault's theory of discourse being the most influential, and constructivism lies at the core of the theory. On the one hand, the theory of discourse highlights the function discourse performs in constructing subjectivity and the reality; on the other hand, it aims to reveal the symbiotic relation between the power and knowledge behind discourse. Thus, the theory dissolves the cognitive agency of the subject while foregrounding the subject's construction of discourse, and it highlights the representational practice of discourse while forecloses the social material practice of the non-discourse. …
On Plato's Religious Justice And Artistic Justice, Yun Wang
On Plato's Religious Justice And Artistic Justice, Yun Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The paper aims to probe into Plato's thoughts on religious justice and artistic justice through a critical reading of his Republic in terms of its contributions to the theory of justice. Plato's conceptualization of justice refers not merely to the justice in social life but also to religious justice and artistic justice, despite the fact that these term are not used explicitly per se. This paper argues that Plato's theorization of justice in The Republic proves to be the most distinctive and most valuable by putting justice in different perspectives from different areas.
Postmodernity, Hegemony, Sexuality, Alderson David
Postmodernity, Hegemony, Sexuality, Alderson David
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Michel Foucault influentially dismissed 'Freudo-Marxism' in his History of Sexuality, vol. 1. This paper, by contrast, proposes a critique of postmodern theory, as well as theories of postmodernity, in proposing a return to the preoccupations of Herbert Marcuse in relation to sexuality. Specifically, the paper suggests that we must take account of the transformations in capitalism that have taken place since Marcuse's time when revisiting his work, but that his category of the performance principle is now even more relevant than it was when he elaborated it. Nonetheless, his theory of repressive desublimation is revised as repressive incitement, and a …