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Full-Text Articles in Chinese Studies
A Study Of The "World" Metaphor In Contemporary Western Narrative Theories, Jianguo Yang
A Study Of The "World" Metaphor In Contemporary Western Narrative Theories, Jianguo Yang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
From the last 20 years of the 20th century, the metaphor of "world" found its way into narrative studies, resulting in a set of new narrative concepts as possible worlds, fictional worlds, and story worlds. With the help of these concepts, narrative researchers could break away from the text-focusedness in classical structuralist narratology and direct the focus of study to such problem as the ontological status of fictional narratives, the immersion effect of literary reading, and the flow of stories in transmedia channels. This article begins with an introduction of the definitions, historical development, and current situations of three major …
Canon Model: On The Repetitive Structure Of Oral Narration, Ruoran Huang
Canon Model: On The Repetitive Structure Of Oral Narration, Ruoran Huang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Repetition scatters in narrative, and it shows the heterogeneous isomorphism with differences integrated with repetitions. Due to the shared textuality thinking between inherent musicality of oral literature and polyphony, canon model with its contrapuntal compositional technique is universally found in the compositional mechanism of oral literature, – and creates a narration of repetition based on imitation under temporal principle and counterpoint under spatial principle. Within a single text and across multiple texts, canon model may take the forms of parallel canon, mirror canon and endless canon based on the development of plot. The former two forms can further be divided …
Events Toward The Future: Event Theory Turn From The Perspective Of Contemporary Thinkers, Jiang Lan
Events Toward The Future: Event Theory Turn From The Perspective Of Contemporary Thinkers, Jiang Lan
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
A turn is seen in event theory in the 21st century intellectual history, and the highlighting of the issue of event manifests man's aspiration to change the world. Event is a singularity, and cannot be reduced to a discourse or degree in an established order, since it itself constitutes a challenge to the discursive structure of the order. The emergence of an event signifies the occupation of a new place, so that absolute transformations can be made in new places and spaces. This is the starting point from which contemporary thinkers, such as Gilles Deleuze, Slovaj Žižek, and Alain Badiou, …
The Political Dimension Of "Empty Signifier": From Levi-Strauss To Žižek, Weijing Xiao
The Political Dimension Of "Empty Signifier": From Levi-Strauss To Žižek, Weijing Xiao
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The political dimension of signifier is a hidden clue that runs through structuralism to post-Marxism. Empty signifier has no specific signification but can embrace all signifiers. Its theoretical foundations are the difference and arbitrariness of language systems, the signifier chain, anchor point, and object a as developed by Lacan. Levi-Strauss' analysis of the "excess of signifier" and "Mana" in treatment of shamanism has the connotation of empty signifier. Laclau believed that the process of cohesion from floating signifiers to the master signifier with "links" is the process of leadership competition and formation, where the dominant signifier has to absorb the …
Body-Ethics Or Body-Aesthetics?: An Investigation Into Terry Eagleton's Recent View On Body, Zhike Yin
Body-Ethics Or Body-Aesthetics?: An Investigation Into Terry Eagleton's Recent View On Body, Zhike Yin
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
According to Terry Eagleton, culturalism in postmodern thought emphasizes culture's conquest of nature, which refrains from criticizing culture itself, but veils the finiteness of body with the infiniteness of will. Eagleton argues that the foundation of human reason is the dependent and limited human body, and that reason must reflect on whether culture would result in overestimation of the power of will and desire. Eagleton's view on body-aesthetics is a blend of ideas from Aristotle, British empiricists, Kant and Karl Marx. For Eagleton, both artworks and body have internal value and telos, and thus do not yield to any external …
Culture Industry And Mass Deception: Critical Perspectives On Contemporary Concerns About Soft Power In China, Gregory Mahoney Josef
Culture Industry And Mass Deception: Critical Perspectives On Contemporary Concerns About Soft Power In China, Gregory Mahoney Josef
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's concept of the culture industry remains a powerful description of the fate of art, literature and other cultural products in an era where media and information technology have made culture more industrial and reifying than ever before. We revisit this concept, tracing it forward from Walter Benjamin's initial contributions and proceeding onward the work of Herbert Marcuse against the backdrop of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. We provide a brief description of historical origins with David Hawkes' works on the emergence of commodity fetishism in 16th-century England and carry this forward to Joseph S. Nye's …
Narrative Reliability And Literary Authenticity, Shouyi Jiang
Narrative Reliability And Literary Authenticity, Shouyi Jiang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Narrative reliability focuses on specific textual strategies, while literary authenticity highlights the overall effect of presentation. In terms of rhetoric, the former reflects the rhetorical strategy of the implied author through the narrator, so that the latter can be guaranteed on the narrative level. In terms of cognition, narrative reliability relies on the reader's perspective mechanism, for which literary authenticity serves as the potential basis. Considering the factor of the real author, new situations regarding the narrative reliability of the implicit author's rhetoric and the reader's cognition will arise, which leads to the diversification of literary authenticity. Given that the …
Somaesthetics And The Justification Of Body-Mind Monism: An Account From The Perspective Of Marx's Historical Materialism, Yingmin Fang
Somaesthetics And The Justification Of Body-Mind Monism: An Account From The Perspective Of Marx's Historical Materialism, Yingmin Fang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Although body-mind monism is the philosophical basis of somaesthetics, it is not readily justifiable within the intellectual history of Western philosophy and aesthetics. Western philosophers such as Ludwig Feuerbach and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, rooted in essentialist thinking, veered between affirming and negating body, thus failing to adhere to body-mind monism. The transcendence of the essentialist predicament was realized through Marx's theory of historical materialism, and a way to justify body-mind monism is thus introduced. From the perspective of Marxist historical materialism, the nature of body-mind relation as a theoretical preposition is translated from the essentialist understanding of a theoretical problem to …
Mythological Narrative Of The Clouds And Its Tragic Characteristic, Chunlian Chen
Mythological Narrative Of The Clouds And Its Tragic Characteristic, Chunlian Chen
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In Aristophanes's The Clouds, Socrates is a Promethean figure. While Prometheus steals fire from heaven in order to rescue human beings from extinction, Socrates attempts to educate Athenian citizensin rational conduct with his method so as to save their morality from the impact of the Sophistic movement. However, just like the fire that Prometheus has brought to mankind, which has both good and bad sides, the Socratic method could also be dangerous. His moral education is doomed to fail because people have desires and cannot live with their reason only. In The Clouds, Aristophanes continues to explore the theme that …
Three Faces Of Genre: Exploring Theoretical Approachesto Western Film Genre, Lin Gui
Three Faces Of Genre: Exploring Theoretical Approachesto Western Film Genre, Lin Gui
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Theoretical studies of Western film genre started in the late 1940s, and have become significant for Western film studies. The theoretical construction has mainly been based on the Hollywood film industry and genre. After more than half a century, a lot of achievements have been made in genre studies. As a multi-dimensional phenomenon, genre includes various systems and conventions that formulate these systems, which further complicated genre studies. This article attempts to classify and summarize the findings of Western film genre theory with three theoretical approaches: cultural genre theory, artistic genre theory, as well as political and economic genre theory. …
Literary Friendship Revisited: Significance Of Wayne Booth's Literary Ethics To The Contemporary Literary Studies, Yun Fan
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The theories and critiques since the 1960s have snared contemporary literary studies into a predicament, and with the emergence of post-critique, reviewing Wayne Booth' literary ethics may cast some new light on the predicament. His efforts to reconstruct literary ethics, call for literary friendship, elucidate rhetoric ethics, and explore the public dimension of conduction will illuminate the reshaping of cultural character and the return to ethics and life in contemporary literary studies.
The Mind Of The Other, Political Organism, And The Dramatic Nature Of Ordinary Language: A Case Study Of Stanley Cavell's Comments On Coriolanus, Yunke Lin
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Stanly Cavell is the precursor to apply the philosophy of ordinary language, especially the thought of later Ludwig Wittgenstein, into analyzing literary and artistic works. Through detailed analysis of Wittgenstein's discussions on the issues of "the mind of the other" and "private language"s, Cavell claims that thinking in ordinary language is a seduction of the skepticism brought about by the myth of positivism. In his reading of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Cavell expounds "appetite" as a metaphor of political organism, demonstrating how Wittgenstein's criticism is embodied in a dramatic way. The ontological mechanism of drama realized through explorations of ordinary language is …
William James's Philosophy Of Aesthetic Temporality: About The Relationship Between The Horizontal Composition Of Stream Of Consciousness And The Integrality Of The Spatial Composition Of Art Works, Yanshun Liu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
William James's grasp of the original practical activities underlies his aesthetic thought of pragmatism. He is well versed in describing and analyzing the aesthetic phenomena in the field where the subject and the object are not separated. On the one hand, he emphasizes the impromptu features of aesthetic behaviors driven by meaning-seeking, centering on the analysis of their fresh state, which is original, occasional while inevitable. On the other hand, he also creatively explores the horizontal features of the smooth and impromptu development of aesthetic life from the perspective of stream of consciousness or consciousness of time. He believes that …
Types And Subtypes Of Artistic Justice, Yun Wang
Types And Subtypes Of Artistic Justice, Yun Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Because forms of performing arts and story-telling such as drama, fiction, and film present a caricature of social life, they inevitably describe people's good and evil deeds and their conflicts. In the world history of art over two thousand years,numerous works of drama, fiction, and film have done so from a position of correct or at least relatively correct morality. In this sense, artistic justice is an eternal theme for performing arts and story-telling,and the theory of artistic justice should have been well established. However, in the present-day, works on artistic justice are mostly published by scholars in the field …