From Literary Criticism to Cultural Studies

From Literary Criticism to Cultural Studies

Abstract: Literary criticism is a view about nature? Literature? Criticism. However, looking back at the history, the development and evolution of literary criticism shows a track from parasitism to literature. Today's cultural research is a new stage of literary criticism towards independence, which can be divorced from literary objects and even marginalize literature. The reason is that the substitution of consumption culture for literature and culture provides a historical opportunity for the independent status of cultural research.

Paper Keywords: literary criticism; Parasitic; Systematization of theory; independence

This is a natural view. Literature? Criticism. However, looking back at the history, the development and evolution of literary criticism shows a track from parasitism to literature.

In Aristotle's Poetics, literary criticism is mainly reflected in the interpretation of basic literary paradigms such as literary types and genres. Poetics initiated literary criticism and established the inseparable relationship between criticism and literature.

The criticism of popular philology in the Middle Ages mainly focused on literary works and classic works. As a sister discipline of literature and law, philology has a rhetorical tradition, pays attention to words and styles, and pays attention to text details, so philology criticism does not pursue critical positions, principles or systems. With writing becoming a field of great concern, the Middle Ages? Scholastic philosopher? It is regarded by later generations as a spider web that weaves knowledge with words. Francis? Bacon wrote in the article "Academic Progress":? Therefore, the first drawback of scholarship arises: only study the text, not the content. Although the example I gave is a thing of the past, such disadvantages have always existed and will continue to exist. ? This kind of criticism is parasitic on classics, including literary classics, and philological criticism depends on the original works of literature and history.

/kloc-there was a great debate about what style literature should pursue in the 0/7th century. The three speech styles summarized in Cicero's The Speaker, which has always been regarded as a model, are questioned. People gave up the model of Cicero's prose style and put forward? Neutral? Language and other new styles. However, this change has not broken through the critical horizon in the framework, and is still confined to the framework of language style, only replacing the old style with a new style.

Boileau's criticism of French classicism, such as epics, tragedies, comedies, sonnets, satires, etc., must be based on the works of ancient Greece and Rome and conform to the three unified standards. It can be seen that classical criticism is mainly aimed at creation and still at works, but at the same time it establishes the authority of criticism.

The loosening or rebellion against the critical law occurred in19th century. Romantic criticism is a rebellion against the unified criticism standard of classicism, which is the first time in the history of criticism? Chaos? There are different criticisms.

The mainstream of romantic criticism is personal experience criticism, and the representative figures are Mrs. Starr and Herzlet. Madame de stael is considered to be the first person to experience criticism with her personal talent, which means that critics try to experience what the writer has experienced in her works again. Such critics themselves often have a strong talent. Bly pointed out that it is? Criticizing a genius for participating in the genius existence of others is at least based on a potential similarity between himself and the people he admires? . Empirical criticism still establishes the parasitic relationship between criticism and literary works, which is embodied in the perceptual experience that literary criticism experiences as a secondary consciousness in the primary consciousness.

This assurance can be divided into two situations. One is recognition, that is, criticism gains an experience consistent with the text: the critic's criticism is based on personal experience and attached to sympathy and appreciation of the original work, and the temperament of the critic is often consistent with the taste and feeling of the writer. This kind of identity criticism constitutes a close relationship between critics and works, and critics and authors form a conspiracy. Through reading, critics give up themselves and become? The intersection of various States? (du bois), where critics become writers, the soul of writers is open to critics here. The other is distance-oriented, which also takes the work as the object of criticism, but the critic keeps a distance from the work. The criticism is not intentional, but pure? Looking down and staring? (Starobinski) The relationship between criticism and the object of work is unsympathetic. The critic realized that he was separated from his object of criticism. Claudell summed up this situation as? Understand but disagree? It is different from the poetic thinking of works, and criticism is the expression of the writer's self-thought. However? Identify with criticism? With what? Distance criticism? Not completely separated, as Tasrobinsky said: A complete criticism may be neither a criticism of wholeness nor a criticism of immanence, but a criticism that sometimes needs a bird's eye view and sometimes needs to stare inward. ?

However,? Distance criticism? Later, it gained further development and gradually merged into rational criticism. Contrary to the mainstream of romantic empirical subjective criticism, rational criticism, including criticism brought by historical methods? New language and literature? Criticism, that is, to explain the work through the conditions of its production; There are also criticisms that focus on the relationship between criticism and readers, such as Lessing's laocoon or On the Boundary between Painting and Poetry. Of course, there are Renan's naturalistic historical criticism, Dana's positivist scientific criticism and so on.

These have led to what is usually called criticism in a truly modern sense, which began in the19th century, that is? Criticism? It means rational analysis and criticism. In the middle and late period of19th century, literary criticism changed from paying attention to inner feelings to social and historical criticism adapted to critical realistic literature, and became the mainstream of literary criticism. The relationship between literature and the times, literature and social reality has become the new focus of literary criticism. By the middle and late19th century, literary criticism had gradually changed from subjective feeling of the richness of literary criticism to a single logic and paradigm of social and historical criticism, which gained a unique position. This shows that although criticism originated from the literary garden, it can become itself, because literature is not only aesthetic, but also has great social and historical relevance, and criticism can be external.

By the beginning of the 20th century, criticism once again broke the exclusive single social and historical standard and formed a new round of criticism. Chaos? Literary criticism has gone out of the paradigm of respecting social and historical ontology and turned to linguistic ontology and formal ontology, bringing a new pattern of coexistence of various criticism styles. Formalism criticism, new criticism, structuralism and semiotic criticism all have their own purposes, but the same thing is that they all bid farewell to the reality, society, nature, times, history, morality and economy of literature? External criticism? , began to explore the internal language, form and structure of literature. Later psychoanalytic criticism and phenomenological theme criticism also prevailed. In addition, the social and historical criticism of the previous stage has produced new branches in this period: there is criticism of western Marxism, which pays attention to the social ideology of literature; There are also reception aesthetic criticism that pays attention to the reader's dimension, and then there is new historicism criticism, which is unprecedented prosperity.

If before the19th century, criticism was directed at or centered on literature, and criticism was secondary, then in the 20th century, criticisms of various schools invariably turned to build their own theoretical systems. Criticism is no longer integrated into literature, recognized literature, even copied literature, or the expression of literary expression, like the criticism of The Romantic Period Coleridge and Herzlet. In the first half of the 20th century, all schools of criticism had a distinct sense of critical discipline, and criticism expressed itself, while literature retreated to the second place because it served criticism and expressed itself for criticism's sake. Interpretation of works is not the purpose, but the construction of critical system has become the primary purpose of criticism, and literature has become the raw material field for the construction of critical system. Therefore, in the first half of the 20th century, criticism has begun to take the road of independence. If it is not completely independent of literature at first, but still related to literature, then this correlation is manifested as literature is the place of discourse or the object of critical theory, although literature is no longer the goal. This criticism that literary works are not regarded as an organism, or that they are not directed at literature, has aroused the anger of literary researchers in the traditional position, because in this criticism, works are only used as a single footnote of theory. For example, psychoanalytic criticism does not regard Hamlet as an organic work, but grabs the so-called Oedipus complex that conforms to psychoanalysis from it and takes it as the conclusion of the interpretation of Hamlet. This is probably what St. Boff called not sympathy and recognition, but coveting other people's wealth and grabbing necessary criticism from it.