Why"Literary Theory without Literature"?A Socratic Apologia
As a proposition,"Literary Theory without Literature"was put forward in the early 21st century.It may seem a bit weird if one reads it just in its literal sense:Could a"Literary Theory"still be called"Literary Theory"without"Literature"?However,if he or she has a certain knowledge of the formation process of"literature","literariness"and"literary institution"both in China and the West in the 20th century,then the question of what kind of"literature"a"literary theory"should include is not self-evident.Literature is a mod-ern concept,a modernized concept,and the"modernity"or"modernization"means the"scientific"division of the object world.In the wave of the modernization,aesthetics has become an independent or auton-omous field,an island far away from the whole society and all sciences.But this inward aestheticiza-tion movement(e.g.aestheticism)is actually companied with an outward aestheticization movement(e.g.aes-theticization of daily life).Although it cannot be regarded that the latter has completely replaced the former,it can be argued that the purity of the aesthetic has no longer existed at the factual level.This new shift in aesthetic facts is forcefully urging us to redefine"literature"and"literariness",to re-examine the essential object of"literary theory",and especially to recognize the inventive nature of this object.As a result,"Literary theory without literature"came into being,and it aims at redefining and asserting the social nature of literary theory,adjusting the structural relationship between literariness and non-literariness with-in literary texts,and opening up a new theoretical path form the national literature to the world literature.
literarinessnon-literarinessLiterature-culture StudyHermeneutics"Literary Theory without Literature"
万方数据
