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Full-Text Articles in Chinese Studies
Potentiality, Resistance And Bare Life: Giorgio Agamben On Melville’S Bartleby, Yanjun Wang, Yaping Wang
Potentiality, Resistance And Bare Life: Giorgio Agamben On Melville’S Bartleby, Yanjun Wang, Yaping Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The idea of potentiality runs through Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. In his analysis of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener, Agamben thoroughly interprets potentiality and bare life through Bartleby’s “I prefer not to”. Agamben believes that Bartleby’s inoperativeness is the highest form of resistance, which exists as pure potentiality against the power apparatuses in modern society. Agamben considers Bartleby’s inoperativeness as the exact way to redeem bare life in modern society, where the state of exception already becomes normality. This article starts with Agamben’s reading of Bartley, focuses on potentiality, resistance and bare life to analyze the pure and thorough way …
Robert T. Tally Jr.’S Spatial Literary Studies, Ying Fang
Robert T. Tally Jr.’S Spatial Literary Studies, Ying Fang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The “Spatial Turn” in humanities and social sciences has given rise to “spatial literary studies” in the field of literature. Robert T. Tally Jr., an American scholar, has been playing a leading role in promoting spatial literary studies in the United States and around the world. Over the course of about 20 years’ work in this area, Tally has built up a theoretical system consisting of such concepts as topophrenia, literary cartography, literary geography, geocriticism, and cartography, which correspond to the framework of “being-writing-text-criticism-theorizing”. He has also carried out a profound theoretical exploration with much originality about literary mapping, spatial …
Speculative Aesthetics And Subject-Object Relation: Michelangelo Antonioni And Samuel Beckett As Examples, Chang Chen
Speculative Aesthetics And Subject-Object Relation: Michelangelo Antonioni And Samuel Beckett As Examples, Chang Chen
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Speculative realism explores the substance of objects existing outside of humans’ subjective frame of thought. Under its radiation, Western aesthetics in the last five years has developed a new trend of speculative aesthetics composed of various branches, stimulating a shift in existing art paradigms. However, inside this trend, two camps of aesthetic discussions, with speculative materialism and object-oriented ontology as their respective starting points, are in great division. This article attempts to work through and clarify the tension as well as interaction among the various branches of speculative aesthetics, by mainly focusing on how speculative aesthetics talks about art outside …
Cruelfictions Of Psychoanalysis: From Freud To Kafka; From Derrida To Mignotte, Rabaté Jean-Michel
Cruelfictions Of Psychoanalysis: From Freud To Kafka; From Derrida To Mignotte, Rabaté Jean-Michel
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Derrida has asserted that the main problem encountered by psychoanalysis is the existence of cruelty, a question that has never been solved. Touria Mignotte has responded to these criticisms and queries in Cruelty, Sexuality, and the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis by deploying a concept of cruelty that is not simply cultural but psychoanalytical. Following Mignotte’s lead, I attempt to situate the investigation at a foundational level that looks at the body. Derrida’s argument about psychoanalysis is compared with Deleuze’s essay on sadism and masochism, after which I outline points of convergence in their approaches, which leads to discussions of texts by …
How The Althusserian Critics Inherit And Develop Marx’S Thought Of Artistic Production, Jifang Duan
How The Althusserian Critics Inherit And Develop Marx’S Thought Of Artistic Production, Jifang Duan
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
How Althusserian critics inherited and developed Marx’s thought of artistic production is an important theoretical issue in the development of Marxist theory on literature and art. Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey and Terry Eagleton put forward important theoretical concepts such as “symptomatic criticism”, “silence” and “aesthetic ideological criticism” within the framework of Marxist philosophy and ideology, expanding Marx’s thought of artistic production in the light of the relation between ideology and aesthetic discourses, and thus they have enriched the theoretical connotation of Marx’s theory and promoted the thought of artistic production, enabling it to take root in textual criticism and move …
Pleasure And Aesthetic Experience From The Perspective Of Neuroaesthetics, Jun Hu
Pleasure And Aesthetic Experience From The Perspective Of Neuroaesthetics, Jun Hu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The study of the relationship between cognition and emotion in the common aesthetic mechanism of human brain is subject to debates. Oshin Vartanian, among others, suggests that cognition and emotion play an equally important role in the aesthetic process. He brings the concept of "pleasure" to the forefront in aesthetic experience and attempts to build a theoretical framework of neuroaesthetics that can link the study of emotion and that of cognition. Based on the aesthetic experience processing patterns, the emotional experience theory, as well as aesthetic experiential cases, Vartanian speculates and illustrates how "pleasure" plays a role in aesthetic experience. …
Towards "Post-Critique": A Debate Over The Future Of Western Literary Studies, Hansong Dan
Towards "Post-Critique": A Debate Over The Future Of Western Literary Studies, Hansong Dan
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In the era of "after theory", it is always a heated scholarly issue to debate over the future of Western literary studies. Recently, Rita Felski and Joseph North respectively advance their arguments as to how literary studies as a discipline can overcome its methodological and disciplinary impasse. After a scrutiny of the inherent flaws of contemporary criticism, Felski suggests that we choose to practice "post-critique" so as to avoid the restraints of the "hermeneutics of suspicion". She is much in favor of Latour's "Actor Network Theory", which in her view is a significant new tool to reorganize literary criticism. North's …
"Re-Theatricalization" And "Re-Totalization": The Historical Influence Of Japanese Touring Troupes On The "Revitalization" Of Western Theatre In The Early 20th Century, Yang Gao
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
From the turn of the century to the 1930s, three Japanese theatre troupes successively toured the West spanning a long period of time and a large geographic area. During their overseas tours, the various "theatrical" and "total" qualities identified in the troupes' stage performances highly fascinated and impressed the Westerners. Although the Westerners' reception of the Japanese touring troupes' performances was inevitably accompanied by some "(mis)interpretations". Nonetheless, these "(mis)interpretations" could be regarded as a kind of positive "self-affirmation", which greatly strengthened and reinforced the ideals and visions of some innovative Western theatre practitioners who had been aspiring to "revitalize" Western …
Fictional Characters From The Perspective Of Possible Worlds Theory, Bei Qiu
Fictional Characters From The Perspective Of Possible Worlds Theory, Bei Qiu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
According to the possible worlds theory, there are three types of alethic logics, i.e. necessity, possibility and impossibility. Literary works can then be seen as a specific possible world: fictional narrative world, while characters are its inhabitants. Taking into consideration the accessible relation of the fictional characters with the human beings in the real worlds, we divide the fictional characters into plausible characters, physically impossible characters and logically impossible characters. These three types of characters cover all the character types in fictional works. Possible worlds theory provides a new research scale and theoretical framework for categorizing character types as well …
Joyce Le Sinthome: Literature And Writing Under The Perspective Of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Juanjuan Ye
Joyce Le Sinthome: Literature And Writing Under The Perspective Of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, Juanjuan Ye
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
From the onset of psychoanalysis, literature has been its common topic. The change in theoretical positions and ethical concerns from Sigmund Freud to Jacques Lacan led to the upgrading of literature from the symptom to the sinthome of the subject. Lacan theorized his literary criticism by analysing the "Joyce lesinthome", and hence the proposition of literature as the sinthome of the subject. On the one hand, literature enacts a break-away from the imaginary and the symbolic by way of writing, and represents the subject's jouissance of the unconscious by way of a resetting of letters through meaning reduction. On the …
Kitsch, Mecacci Andrea
Kitsch, Mecacci Andrea
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Used improperly as a synonym for "bad taste", the term kitsch refers to one of the most important aesthetic categories of the last century. This paper, after trying to provide a historical framework of kitsch, focuses on two themes: the kitsch object and the link between postmodernism and kitsch, which will be referred to as neo-kitsch. In the first field of investigation, through the morphology of the kitsch object, the opposition of the kitsch aesthetic to that of functionalism will be outlined. Neo-kitsch, on the other hand, will be interpreted as a process of aesthetic hybridisation, one of the most …
The Somaesthetics Of The Multitude: The Politico-Aesthetic Logic Of Antonio Negri And Michael Hardt In Constructing The Subjecthood, Jinying Li
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
"The Multitude", a concept reconstructed by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt after the deconstruction of the subjecthood by post-structuralism, is a combination of singularity and commonality, and physicality and affection, and it is the subjecthood of postmodern society that overthrows the control of the empire and constructs the commonwealth. In the early days, Negri began to explore social issues from the perspective of the relationship between art and the multitude. From this perspective, his logics in constructing the multitude can be summed up as aestheticization and bio-politicization, and its inner trajectory of reasoning can be summarized as a transformation from …
Fictional Text And Reality Of The Possible, Shusheng Zhang
Fictional Text And Reality Of The Possible, Shusheng Zhang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
This article explores the issue of reference in fictional texts, that is, the relationship between fictional texts and reality. Paul Ricoeur thinks that the reference of poetic language is not cancelled, but only suspended. Through its semantic creativity, it possesses the ability to transform reality and to turn our personal environment into a habitable world. The interpretation of the concept "world /Welt" and "environment /Umwelt" by Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer shed light on the significance of fictional texts in reality, for they propose to us possible modes of existence in the ontological sense. In other words, fictional texts can …
Juxtaposition, Narrative Strategies, And Multimedia Explorations: Representation Of Time In Comics, Xu Lian
Juxtaposition, Narrative Strategies, And Multimedia Explorations: Representation Of Time In Comics, Xu Lian
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Following the tradition of narratology and comics studies, this article explores various ways of representing time in comics and displays the complexity and diversity of temporal representation in the grammar of comics. It focuses on spatialization, closure, order, speed, and innovation enabled by virtue of multimedia explorations. Spatialization strategies such as juxtaposition and collage are basic ways to represent time in comics, and closure of perception is also critical in understanding time. However, new forms like music comics and webcomics have significantly changed the structure of temporal representation.
Third Reading Of Early Film Theory: The Turn To Dispositif, Affect, And Action Comedy, Yingjin Zhang
Third Reading Of Early Film Theory: The Turn To Dispositif, Affect, And Action Comedy, Yingjin Zhang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Early film studies has spread rapidly since the 1990s and become a mainstay in film studies in Euro-American academia, bringing technological innovation, visual culture, and urban modernity into film historiography and thus enriching scholarship in a field previously dominated by close textual reading. This article continues my tracking of early film studies but concentrates on methodological issues of the recent focus on “media archaeology.” My “Reading Early Film Theory: Collective Sensorium and Vernacular Modernism” (2005) introduces Miriam Hansen's theory and Zhen Zhang's book on reconstructing a cultural history of Shanghai film. My follow-up “Rereading Early Film Theory: In Pursuit of …
Recoding Postmodernist Art Criticism: The Debate Between Anti-Pluralism And Pluralism, Juanjuan Yang
Recoding Postmodernist Art Criticism: The Debate Between Anti-Pluralism And Pluralism, Juanjuan Yang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
While pluralism is considered politically correct today, this article tries to describe the trajectory of anti-pluralist criticism through some famous authors of October, specifically Hal Foster, who edited the seminal Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. In the beginning of the 1980s, Foster categorized two types of postmodernism, one being the postmodernism of reaction and neo-conservatism, the other being postmodernism of resistance and post-structuralism. Aligning with the latter of the two types, major authors of October published a series of important essays to criticize “mainstream postmodernist art, ” especially neo-expressionist paintings. However, during the same period, Arthur Danto claimed“the end of …
Cabaret Voltaire Or Kabarett Voltaire? Three Breakthroughs Of The Concept Gesamtkunstwerk, Duozhi Chen
Cabaret Voltaire Or Kabarett Voltaire? Three Breakthroughs Of The Concept Gesamtkunstwerk, Duozhi Chen
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The birthplace of Dadaism in Switzerland is often simply translated into Chinese as “Voltaire Pub”. As an art salon, it actually finds its prototype in artists' pubs in Germany. The word “Cabaret” translated as “pub”, is also the general term for the entertaining variety shows therein,which originated in France. After its introduction into the German-speaking area, Cabaret became Kabarett and its cultural connotations and ways of presentations underwent great changes due to its collision with the avant-garde movement. Therefore, the simplified understanding of Cabaret as a pub downplays the significance of the Cabaret Voltaire in the history of modern art. …
Writing Of Futurity: On Derrida's Hauntology, Yun Li
Writing Of Futurity: On Derrida's Hauntology, Yun Li
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In Spectres of Marx, Jacques Derrida answers the post-Levinasian question: how to respond to the Other. He claims that The Communist Manifesto has become an injunction of Marx, who requires our response. We have to respond to it and speak, as Marx does, in a non-metaphysical way. Since it is beyond the economy of re-presentation, writing does not produce presence. Thus, everything in it is spectral. But it takes us into l＇avenir or futurity, a "spacing ( and) temporizing" different from the space-time produced by re-presentation, because it constitutes an "ethicality" which goes beyond the metaphysical subjective conquest of the …
Post-Structural Theories And Chinese Feminist Criticism: On The Theorization Of Women's “Subjectivity” In The Cultural Studies Of Socialist China, Xi Liu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Centering on the conceptualization of "subjectivity," this article first traces the post-structural theories' impact on as well as their complex relationship with Western feminism. It then explores the development of the theorization of “women 's subjectivity" in academic research on Chinese women and gender discourses in socialist China from the 1980s. By examining the application of three influential theorists, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler, in the Chinese context, this article intends to show the complex genealogy of "appropriating" post-structural theories for different agendas of contemporary Chinese feminist criticism. Some scholars integrated post-structural ideas into liberal-humanist discourses; some employed …
Narrative Of Habitus Distinction: From Fantasy Of Identity To Competition Of Elegance——Centering On The Image Of People Subject To Identity Transformations In Modern Fictions, Daizong Yu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Sociological or anthropological list of the habitus of people are from different classes, focusing on the strategy and function of habitus distinction in social struggles from the perspectives of political culture, economic level, and intergenerational reproduction. In contrast, modern fictions depict different forms of struggles from the perspectives of perceptual experience, emotional change, and taste preference. The narrative of habitus distinction in modern fictions shows the obstinacy of old habitus, the fragility of new habitus, and the aggressiveness of habitus in the struggles of classification. Its insight and aesthetic interpretation provide not only a more precise way but also a …
Fables Agreed Upon: A Comparative Study Of New Historicism And Alternate History, Feng Li, Yitzhak Lewis
Fables Agreed Upon: A Comparative Study Of New Historicism And Alternate History, Feng Li, Yitzhak Lewis
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
New Historicism and alternate history raise similar questions regarding history and ideology. New Historicism reads every text as an alternate history narrative, while the narrative mode in alternate history can inspire a nuanced understanding of the critical positions promoted by New Historicism. The paper offers a comparative study of the two in terms of their conceptualizations of historical narrative, intertextuality, narrativity, non-linear structure and spatiality. It seeks to create dialogues between different voices in both the critical theory and the literary genre with respect to their attention to mundane matters, their allusions to the present and projections of the future, …
Classic Literary Criticism As The Embryo Of Productional Literary Criticism, Wenfang Yao
Classic Literary Criticism As The Embryo Of Productional Literary Criticism, Wenfang Yao
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
A significant development of Euro-American literary criticism in the 20th century is its progress regarding the issue of "art production," which, by including into it the practice of literary reading and literary criticism, breaks through the previous theoretical assumption that "art production" is limited to literary creation. Classic critics such as Albert Thibaudet, T.S. Eliot, Ivor Armstrong Richards, and Northrop Frye have, through practical experiences of literary criticism, discovered and confirmed the production of literary criticism. They have not only embarked on verifying such production through scientific experiments, but also conceptualized the ways in which productional criticism can be conducted …
Indexicality Strikes Back: From The Photographical Past To The Digital Present, Jia Peng
Indexicality Strikes Back: From The Photographical Past To The Digital Present, Jia Peng
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Indexicality as a logic category of signs anchors semiotic cognition and reality. As photographs record the existence of objects, indexicality is considered as the evidence of the "objectivity" of photographic signs. With the development of digital technology, indexicality seems to decline and even disappear, since the objects of images no longer necessarily exist. Yet, in Peircean semiotics, the relationship between indices and objects could be either "existential" or "empty", and the latter is further interpreted by Roman Jakobson with the concept of "shifters", a term re-visited in contemporary semiotics of art and image. In the semiotic production of digital images, …
Transformational-Generation: Dynamic Mechanism Of Literary Speech (On The Language Poetics Of The "Yale School," Part Ⅱ), Dengyun Dai
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The linguistic thought of the "Yale School" mainly includes three aspects: (1) the intuition about three dimensions of language (the signified dimension, the inter-dimension, and the self-reflective and referred dimension), (2) the revelation of the transformational-generative mechanism of literary speech, and (3) the new verdict on the primal paradox of the unspeakable. The contents of these three aspects form an organic whole, which cannot be discussed separately. In general, the transformational-generation of the three dimensions of language refers to a mysterious mechanism: from the establishment of the signifier-signified relationship to the loss of reference, from the establishment of the inter-subjective …
Indefinability, Mystique And Theological Implication In Adorno's Natural Beauty, Ting Wang
Indefinability, Mystique And Theological Implication In Adorno's Natural Beauty, Ting Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In Adorno's aesthetics, there is a natural beauty with a particular form: it has no clear concept, but only undefinable and impalpable characteristics. This distinguishes it from rational things, for the essence of natural beauty is unconditional and transcendent. Being transcendent, it is beyond reason. Since indefinability and mystique are appearances presented at its experience level, natural beauty can only be referred to through detour and negation. The rationale for Adorno's set of natural beauty originates from Kant's aesthetics. Like Kant, Adorno distinguishes knowledge from beauty; he differs from Kant in that Kant draws natural beauty from experience and leads …
From Hades To Heimat: Quo Usque Tandem? — The Travels And Travails Of Critical Theory, Weber Samuel
From Hades To Heimat: Quo Usque Tandem? — The Travels And Travails Of Critical Theory, Weber Samuel
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In their book, Dialectics of Enlightenment, written during the Second World War in their exile in the U.S., Adorno and Horkheimer portray Ulysses in the Odyssey as the exemplary Western figure. Focusing on an event that occurs as he takes his revenge not just upon the suitors but upon the women who collaborated with them, the authors raise the question of just what a return home can mean in the Western tradition. They emphasize the violence involved in reclaiming one's "property," as Ulysses' son, Telemachus, executes the women in the most brutal fashion. This allows the author to discuss the …
The Disappearance Of Aura And The Formation Of Dialectical Images: A Discussion Focused On Walter Benjamin's Concept Of Technology, Peijie Chang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The transition from "aura" to "dialectical image" is a key to trace the trajectory of Walter Benjamin's aesthetic thoughts. Benjamin repeatedly specified the connotations, the prerequisites for emergence and the reasons for the disappearance of "aura." As far as artistic problems are concerned, the appearance of aura is closely related to "the semblance of beauty", trance experience and authenticity of things, and the key to this is that the aforementioned factors could ensure the essential distance between the aesthetic subject and the aesthetic object. However, these conditions do not stand under mechanical reproduction technology and aura is destroyed and disappears. …
Distanciation And Artistic Practice: How The Concept Of Masses Was Constructed In Althusser's Literary Criticism, Ju Huo
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
One of Louis Pierre Althusser's contributions to Marxism was to clarify the concept of the political "masses", affirming that the masses of all classes united in struggle functioned as both the departure of action and the end of theory. He thus loomed as a unique presence in the intellectual development of Western Marxism. From the perspective of literary criticism, this paper focuses on Althusser's re-positioning of issues such as author, form and defamiliarization in contemporary critical theory, and on his using the distanciation theory to explicate howideological practice surrounding mass movement intervenes reality and functions in it. The paper tries …
Myth As A Meta-Narrative, Zhiqiang Xu
Myth As A Meta-Narrative, Zhiqiang Xu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Seen from the phenomenological perspective, myth is not a primitive cultural phenomenon, but instead a permanent dimension in human culture, a meta-narrative with fundamental significance for human existence. Myth, as a meta-narrative, not only remains in the background of human existence to provide orientation, but also actively leads believers to return to their arche for authentic human existence. However, myth only occurs in the moment of human predicament, when it becomes necessary to promote the renewal of life by providing an absolute beginning.
"Aesthetic Dignity Of Words": Aestheticism In Theodor W. Adorno's Early Theory On The Philosophy Of Language, Yaochong Wang
"Aesthetic Dignity Of Words": Aestheticism In Theodor W. Adorno's Early Theory On The Philosophy Of Language, Yaochong Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
As a key piece of writing of Theodor W. Adorno's early theory on philosophy of language, Theses on the Language of the Philosopher has lacked scholarly attention for a prolonged period of time. In recent years, Western scholars realize that the philosophy of language in classic critical theory affords potential ideological resources to reflect on the linguistic turn.The new generation of German scholars in critical theory also propose a "language paradigm", which promotes the revival of Adorno's philosophy of language. Adorno's historical contribution to the philosophy of language is based on his creative extension of Walter Benjamin's theology/philosophy of language …