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Articles 61 - 90 of 1362
Full-Text Articles in East Asian Languages and Societies
Can Faith Heal The Cracks In Cultural Politics? On The Theological Turn Of Terry Eagleton In The New Century, Jian Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
With the increasing prominence of religious issues, the “theological turn” in Eagleton’s theory has gradually drawn attention of academics in China. In his theory, Eagleton constructs a god who values creativity, cares for others, and bears the responsibility of crime. Through interpretation of ideal theology, Eagleton constructs a common culture that can be jointly built and shared. This practice continues and develops the attempt of the New Left in Britain to explore the socialist goal through “cultural politics.” The theoretical innovation originates from the conundrum of practice. Compared with Raymond Williams, Eagleton needs to find the power to transform theoretical …
Performing The Melancholy Of City: Body, Death, And Photography, Xiao Cai
Performing The Melancholy Of City: Body, Death, And Photography, Xiao Cai
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Roland Barthes makes it clear in Camera Lucida that the relationship between theatre and photography is the fetish of “loss” and “death”. This extends the essence of photography to the temporal trauma of flow and stillness. As stillness in time is captured by the camera, every shot contains a double death. However, photographers’ bodily intervention not only brings movement in the photo, but also imprints “ruins” on it. As dying things, the intertextuality between the body and the ruins registers the imperceptible process of slow declination of every urban locale in time. Such is a new reflection on space in …
Reversion And Subversion: The Internal Logic And Cultural Dynamics Of The Historical Transformation Of Luxury Consumption, Shiping Jiang
Reversion And Subversion: The Internal Logic And Cultural Dynamics Of The Historical Transformation Of Luxury Consumption, Shiping Jiang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In the history of consumption, luxury consumption is always the marked, and the cultural dynamics of its development is in the markedness of its text and name. Luxury consumption has experienced two waves of popularization, and the markedness of luxury text also changes with the two updates in the form and connotation of luxury. In the era of material consumption, the markedness of luxury is one of symbols. The first popularization of luxury not only turns symbols into the mainstream of consumer culture, but also subverts traditional luxury. With the second popularization of luxury consumption in the era of symbolic …
The Artistic Field During The Yongle-Xuande Reign The Ming Dynasty And The Writing Of The Ministerial Style, Xianpo Yuan
The Artistic Field During The Yongle-Xuande Reign The Ming Dynasty And The Writing Of The Ministerial Style, Xianpo Yuan
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The ministerial style (taigeti), which emerged in the early Ming period (1403-1435), is not only a concept of writing, but also a concept of painting and calligraphy, reflecting the prevailing aesthetics of the time. Due to the promotion of palace-style painting and ministerial style calligraphy, high officials interwove a space of landscape with calligraphy and painting as carriers, through literary and artistic productions of poetry, essay, calligraphy and painting. Distinct from the political space at the imperial court, this is a space for relaxation in their leisure time, when they had freedom to enjoy the leisure interest of mountain and …
The Characteristics And Significance Of Ouyang Xiu’S “Guest As Host” In His Ancient-Style Prose, Guang Xu
The Characteristics And Significance Of Ouyang Xiu’S “Guest As Host” In His Ancient-Style Prose, Guang Xu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Critics since the Song Dynasty, inspired by Soto Zen theory, developed the concept of “host-guest” to analyze the composition of the ancient-style prose. Ouyang Xiu’s ancient-style prose is the representative of applying the concept of “guest as host,” or “guest before host,” or “reciprocal betwen guest and host,” or “hierarchy of guest and host.” Compared with Han Yu and Su Shi, Ouyang Xiu is better at expressing rich and fine emotions with the concept of “guest-host.” In the ancient-style prose, “guest” is prioritized over host, when the prose writings need to establish turns and twists in the textual composition and …
The Interplay Between Traditional Literary Theory And Marxist Literary Criticism In The Past Hundred Years, Wei Han
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
China’s mainstream literary criticism discourse since the 20th century is actually the product of the Sinicization of Marxism. Traditional Chinese literary view of “conveying truth” and Marxist literary criticism’s valorization of “practice” have promoted each other, laying the foundation for the dialogue between ancient and modern theories. The first half of the 20th century witnessed a spontaneous interplay between traditional theory and Marxist criticism in the prevailing popular discourse. The experimental understanding of traditional critical principles and terms in this period by some literary scholars has enhanced the development of literary criticism after the founding of the People’s Republic of …
The Realm Aesthetics Of “Quick” In Su Shi’S Poems, Chunjie Zhu
The Realm Aesthetics Of “Quick” In Su Shi’S Poems, Chunjie Zhu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Su Shi’s advocacy and pursuit of the “quick”(kuai) aesthetic is a phenomenon that should not be ignored in the history of poetry. By appreciating the cheerful poems, imitating the “quick” poetry by literati of previous generations, and promoting the writing of such poetry, he was an early advocate who proposed and perfected the theory of “quick” poetry. In his writings, he combined cheerful and joyful feelings with writings uninterrupted by measuring and weighing the phrases, and tried to construct a “quick” aesthetic realm of poetry. Meanwhile, he injected into this realm new elements of humor and vigor, which established a …
On The Four Forms Of Contemporary Cultural Criticism, Minghua Xiao
On The Four Forms Of Contemporary Cultural Criticism, Minghua Xiao
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In the last 30 years, cultural criticism emerged in studies of literature and art thanks to changes in social and cultural context. Some scholars are appealed to interpretative criticism as a result of epistemological interest in the rising popular culture. Some are stimulated to practice cultural criticism by the anxiety about the change of intellectual identity. Some are dedicated to cultural criticism in order to break through disciplinary restraints or to fulfil intellectuals’ role of responding to public concerns. These forms of cultural criticism can be respectively dubbed as “cultural criticism as popular literary criticism,” “cultural criticism as cultural research,” …
On The Tongcheng School’S Preposition Of “Both Poetry And Prose Following One Principle”, Wuzheng Pan
On The Tongcheng School’S Preposition Of “Both Poetry And Prose Following One Principle”, Wuzheng Pan
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In the Ming and Qing dynasties, literary theories tended to consider poetry and prose as following one principle of composition. The Tongcheng School in the Qing Dynasty emphasized on differentiating genres and opposed the blending of elements of other genres into the ancient-style prose, but this school excelled at both poetry and prose writing, and their proposition of “both poetry and prose following one principle” became a consensus. While the Gong’an School and Yuan Mei’s xingling (spirituality) poetics exploited the Confucian poetics to promote the writing of private life and personal sentiments, the Tongcheng School advocated the virtues of the …
Pre-Qin Concepts Of “Image” And Aesthetic Imagism In Chinese Poetry, Yiming Huang
Pre-Qin Concepts Of “Image” And Aesthetic Imagism In Chinese Poetry, Yiming Huang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Chinese culture and Chinese way of thinking share the characteristic of imagistic correlation, which may be termed as “image-oriented thinking” or “imagistic thinking”. This characteristic is related to many concepts concerning images such as “regarding objects for images” and “watching for image through divination” in The Book of Changes, “no shape in the grand image” in Laozi, and “intangibility of images” by Zhuangzi. A delineation and analytical examination of the concepts concerning image in the pre-Qin literature may illuminate our understanding of how the concepts of image influenced the direct representation of images in the poetry, and the prioritization of …
Reexamining Prototype Theory From The Perspective Of Eleanor Rosch’S New Conception Of Categorization, Huibin He
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Classic categorizations, such as “human beings are animals with two feet,” have obvious defections, as they are too limited to cover the wide range of instances or not rich enough to fully represent the characteristics of the type of beings. The literary prototype theory based on the classic categorization, which regards prototypes as combinations of universal properties and specific particularities, is essentialist and incapable of exploring the true value of prototypes. It is discovered by Eleanor Rosch and other scholars that the abstract attributes are not the criteria for classification of types in everyday life; rather, the most typical prototypes …
Revisiting The Relationship Between Xiqu Illustrations And Stage Performance In The Ming Dynasty, Hao Zhu
Revisiting The Relationship Between Xiqu Illustrations And Stage Performance In The Ming Dynasty, Hao Zhu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Since the 1990s, the relationship between xiqu illustration and stage performance in the Ming dynasty has attracted increased scholarly attention. The conclusions, “performing in accordance with pictures” and “drawing in accordance with performances”, have almost become a self-evident consensus in the history of ancient Chinese printmaking. However, if we re-examine this issue from an interdisciplinary perspective of art history and theatre history, we will find that it is a pseudo-proposition raised to meet specific standards. Xiqu actors did not “perform in accordance pictures”, which was booksellers’ advertising strategy. On the other hand, the problem of “drawing in accordance with performances” …
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 …
Semiotic Analysis Of “Repulsion” And Its Social And Aesthetic Functions, Guanghui Tan
Semiotic Analysis Of “Repulsion” And Its Social And Aesthetic Functions, Guanghui Tan
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Repulsion is not a pure negative emotion. With repulsion, people can tell cleanness from dirtiness, beauty from ugliness, and good from evil. Central to repulsion is the denial of the existence of the other. Repulsion can be divided into physical, material, emotional, and symbolic loathness. Repulsion may be combined with other emotions to form new feelings such as nausea, contempt, pessimism, and arrogance or destructive desire. Most moral norms in human history are constructed through cultivation of people’s repulsion or sense of disgust. In the first place, people construct taboos by defining dirtiness, establish morality through taboos, and stabilize moral …
Self-Understanding Before The Text: Paul Ricoeur's Conceptualization Of The Textual Meaning, Fei Wu
Self-Understanding Before The Text: Paul Ricoeur's Conceptualization Of The Textual Meaning, Fei Wu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Paul Ricoeur rejects the Structuralist view of language as a closed system of symbols, and maintains, from the perspective of semantics, that language inherently possesses a dynamic structure of signification. This signification structure implies the discourse, in linguistic domain, is realized as an event and understood as meaning. But meaning is not wholly subjective, as it is substantialized in linguistic forms during the process of externalization, which to a certain degree enables the comprehensibility of human experience. The act of externalization culminates in literary works. With the cancellation of the realistic context, literary texts are allowed the capacity to refer …
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 …
Spatial Rhetoric And The Visual Generation Of Cultural Memory: A Rhetorical Investigation Of The National Museum Of China, Wei Zhang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Derived from visual rhetoric, the rhetorical of space depends on the physical development of visual rhetoric, the modern generation of visual context and the establishment of space as a mechanism for the production of its meaning. The rhetorical discourse in public cultural space not only has an impact on individual's aesthetic experience, but also regulates the generative logic of cultural memory and cultural identification. The production of spatial rhetoric in the National Museum of China effectively promotes the rhetorical practice of the visually "persuasive" discourse through the spatial layout and structural design of the architecture, the aesthetic application of lights …
A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu: Enlightenment On "Hatred" And "Love", Xiaolei Guo
A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu: Enlightenment On "Hatred" And "Love", Xiaolei Guo
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Marcel Proust's long narrative A la Recherche du Temps Perdu reveals that the inevitable form of existence of the temporal ego, “I”, is alienation, with desire as its psychological expression and "hating the neighbor" as its ethical expression. But Proust also suggests an extra-temporal ego, the “true I.” The narratives of the "true I" and "I" are isomorphic to Sartre's "pre/non-reflective consciousness" and "reflective consciousness." The temporal ego is fictional and the ego is polyphonic. This means that, although "hatred" is the inevitable ethical impulse of the "I" towards the world, "non-hatred" is also a realistic and existential possibility. Lacan …
A Synopsis Of The Symposium Of “Literature And Images” And The Books Launch Of A History Of Literature-Image Relations In China, Wenbo Wang
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
No abstract provided.
A Study Of The Concept Of “Cyborg”, Guodong Li
A Study Of The Concept Of “Cyborg”, Guodong Li
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
“Cyborg” has gradually become a popular term in academic research and popular culture since the 1960s, but its connotation is often ambiguous. From the perspective of its conceptual genealogy, the term “cyborg” invented by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline is based on the image of the mechanized man, but the definition of “cyborg”—“cybernetic organism”— covers the idea of pure machine. Interpreting “cyborg” from the perspective of postmodern philosophy, Donna J. Haraway explicates it as an ontological metaphor and a political myth of irony, producing an intellectual discourse about cyborg that separates the concept from what it originally signifies. …
An Exploration Into The “Essence Of Things” In The Poetics Of The Jin And Song Dynasties, Danjun Cai
An Exploration Into The “Essence Of Things” In The Poetics Of The Jin And Song Dynasties, Danjun Cai
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The discovery and representation of the sound and color of things became the core content in the development of the poetics of the Jin and Song Dynasties, a trend criticized by such critics as Zhong Rong and Liu Xie, who denounced the poetry that indulged in description of things and maintained that poetry should resume the traditions of metaphor and evocation (bixing 比兴) from the Han and Wei dynasties and of the relationship between the object and the self as expressed in “correspondences between feelings and objects.” Such criticism was advocated by later generations, and resulted in many negative comments …
Cultural Studies And The Intellectual Genealogy Of Chinese American Scholars: The Controversies On Lydia H. Liu's Study Of The “National Character” And Beyond, Shi Li
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Lydia H. Liu's criticism on Lu Xun's discourse of national character is not an isolated case in literary criticism, but part of the theoretical nomadism of “translated modernity.” Be it Lydia H. Liu’s conceptualization of “translated modernity,” Leo Ou-fan Lee’s “pursuit of modernity,” David Der-wei Wang’s “repressed modernity,” Rey Chow’s “repressed visuality” or Shu-mei Shih’s “lure of the modern,” the theoretical purport of theirs tends to examine the complex relationship between Chinese literature and politics in the 20th century from the perspective of power criticism, and reflect on the “repressive regime” behind the modern nation-state. The formation of this knowledge …
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 …
Evaluation Of The Identity Of “Fengren” In Classical Chinese Poetics, Shiwei Lv
Evaluation Of The Identity Of “Fengren” In Classical Chinese Poetics, Shiwei Lv
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
“Fengren” is a reference of identity from The Book of Poetry. Classical Chinese poetics has formed a unique evaluation of the identity relevant to the discourse of “Fengren,” which is suggestive of the ethics in The Book of Poetry. In contrast to the identity of “Saoren,” “Fengren”’s identity is linked with political criticism and sarcasm. As “Feng” and “Ya” are gradually distinguished, “Fengren” is differentiated from “Cairen” and becomes increasingly recognizable in terms of expressing meanings metaphorically through things. Thanks to the author community and the content of “Feng,” the style of folk lyric is formed with “Fengren” at its …
From Textual Experiments To Experimental Texts: Expressive Repetition In “Artificial Intelligence Literature”, Tianhua Zhu
From Textual Experiments To Experimental Texts: Expressive Repetition In “Artificial Intelligence Literature”, Tianhua Zhu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
In the 70 years since the birth of artificial intelligence, attempts at literary “creation” with computers have run through the course of technological development, creating what one might call “artificial intelligence literature” (AI literature). Evolving from “textual experiments” carried out by technological researchers to “experimental texts” that explore the possibilities of literary conceptualization, AI literature integrates original problematics including machine thinking, text generation, and machine creation, which exhibits the two-way interaction between social ideas and technological practice. In the early stage, the closed-loop of mutual verification between artistic ideas and technological choices turned out to be a failure, while AI-driven …
Hong Shen’S Artistic Experience And Psychological Journey In The Early 1920s: A Study Of Newly Discovered Correspondence Between Hong Shen And George Pierce Baker, Tingting Zhao
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
I did archival research at Harvard University in the summer of 2019 and found that there were eight letters between Hong Shen and his mentor, Professor George Pierce Baker, from 1920 to 1923. Moreover, a letter that Professor Baker wrote to a certain editor referred to Hong Shen. Most of these letters have never been mentioned in the literature, and those that were mentioned require further study. As these letters from a hundred years ago are valuable to research on Hong Shen, I have specially translated them into Chinese and have done a preliminary study. These letters not only reveal …
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 …
How Did Yuan Zaju Become “Literature Of Its Time Period”: Revisiting The Idea “Every Time Period Has Its Own Literature”, Dajun Xu
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
The sequence of literary form that “poetry of the Tang dynasty, ci-poetry of the Song dynasty and drama of the Yuan dynasty” is often used to advocate the value of Yuan zaju. However, it does not necessarily lead to the assertion that “every time period has its own literature”. In each period of history this assertion conveys different meanings, including the origin, coordination and variation of Yuan zaju, but the value judgements were based on Yuan zaju’s property of verse, considering it as successor of folk-song-styled verse, the exemplary model of dramatic poetry, or the highest level of Chinese poetry. …
Theory And Philosophy: Antonyms In Our Semantic Field?, Jay Martin
Theory And Philosophy: Antonyms In Our Semantic Field?, Jay Martin
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Building on the argument of a 1996 piece called "For Theory," which situated "theory" in a force field of its putative opposite terms, this essay explores the way "philosophy" has come to be considered an antonym of "theory" in much contemporary discourse. It argues that despite their often contrasting meanings and connotations, the two terms would benefit from a dialogue in which the strengths of each were acknowledged without their being either hierarchically positioned or turned into bland synonyms.
Literature's Loss Of Status? Which Status? Whose Status?, Carvalhão Buescu Helena
Literature's Loss Of Status? Which Status? Whose Status?, Carvalhão Buescu Helena
Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art
Humanities' loss of symbolic status and, most especially, literature's loss of symbolic status have, in the last decades, been stated, and frequently overstated. The pessimistic position is to consider that there will be no way back – as if we were at the famous "end of history" that Fukuyama thought to have foreseen with the end of the Berlin wall and the pivotal historical moment lived in its wake. I propose to look at this question with a deeper historical insight, taking into consideration that status (either gained or lost) is always a matter of perspective, of position, and of …