People who stand in the former position believe that poetry, as well as art in a broad sense, are or should be the revealer of truth, whether you understand this truth as the origin or formula of everything, or the transcendental dimension (the truth revealed by God), the correspondence between proposition and reality, or the revelation (opening).
People who stand in the latter position believe that poetry and other literary works are all made by human beings, so we can explore their manufacturing laws and explore their wonderful mysteries, regardless of whether this beauty is understood as the harmony of all parts of things, the conformity of external forms with our hearts, or the coordination and adjustment of various functions in our hearts.
Broadly speaking, the former school believes that great literature must seek its legitimacy from the truth, and good works of art must be able to reveal the truth (whether it is natural truth or apocalyptic truth). Otherwise, even the most beautiful works are false disguises and can only become hypocritical works that satisfy people's low-level sensory enjoyment or whitewash peace. The latter school believes that the "reason for existence" of literary and artistic works is not false, but only because of its own beauty. It's beautiful. Beauty makes us happy. That's enough.
People usually (sometimes inaccurately) call the former an instrumentalist of literature; The latter school is called literary independents.
Plato's famous Yi An Pian puts forward the theory that poets rely on inspiration (specifically spiritual possession) rather than skill. Plato's logic is that since the poet is not an expert in any sense, for example, he is not an expert in driving (major premise); Now he can vividly describe the driving scene (minor premise), so he writes poems (conclusions) by inspiration, not by special skills. This logic is of course strange, because he sets an either-or relationship between expertise and inspiration. In the tenth chapter of the Republic, perhaps more famous, Plato used his idealism to deduce that painters and poets are "three layers apart from truth". To make matters worse, poets (especially tragic poets) resort to the humble part of people's hearts (sensory enjoyment) instead of rationality, which is not only useless to the political system of the ideal city-state, but also harmful. Poetry deviates from truth, goodness and beauty. Based on these two reasons, Plato expelled the tragic poet from his utopia.
But Hegel is undoubtedly on Plato's side. Although Hegel's definition of beauty takes into account the perceptual position: beauty is the perceptual expression of ideas; However, it is obvious that the core of Hegel's definition of beauty is idea. Hegel's ideas are different from Plato's. In Plato's view, ideas are only the origin and form of the world. In Hegel's view, in the sense of vitality, there is another level besides this basic meaning: the concept is full of vitality and requires externalization into some form everywhere. It first appeared in the form of art, then in the form of religion, and finally in the form of philosophy. It is not difficult to see that the idea is always the core of Hegel's thought, and art is only a temporary beautiful coat in its rising process. Therefore, the most famous proposition of Hegel's aesthetics is the final conclusion of art. Objectively speaking, Hegel is not a person who thinks that the beauty of artistic works is irrelevant, but he naturally thinks that it is much more important for art to clarify the truth and carry the idea (or spirit) than the perceptual appearance. He argued quite eloquently that once art is no longer the highest expression of the spirit, people will not worship it, just as once the virgin child is hung on the wall of an art museum and becomes the object of appreciation by the audience with aesthetic eyes, people will never bow to it again!
Nietzsche's situation is a little more complicated. His thought has undergone an important change, the basic symbol of which is the so-called "Wagner incident" (Nietzsche broke with Wagner). Nietzsche did not form a complete concept of art before. In this respect, he basically follows the romantic view and holds the view of artistic independence. We might as well call Nietzsche in this period pre-Nietzsche. In other words, Nietzsche followed the early romantic aesthetics, recognized the unique value of beauty, and advocated that beauty can be independent of truth, goodness and beauty. Later, Nietzsche took a completely different path. With the disagreement with Wagner, the greatest romantic in the19th century, he completely subverted the philosophical discourse of modernity, mocking not only the myth of objectivity of scientific truth in philosophical modernism, but also the arrogance of moral self-discipline in philosophical modernism. More importantly, Nietzsche did not simply reverse the question of poetry and truth or poetry and beauty in his later period: if poetry does not belong to beauty, it belongs to truth. Nietzsche's thoroughness lies in that now he simply thinks that truth or goodness is nothing more than the expression of the will to power: the so-called empirical science and the law of cause and effect are nothing more than the result of modern people's will to power "whip nature with reason" and "reason legislates for nature", which fundamentally belongs to the result of modern Europeans' will to conquer nature and expand to the world. The so-called goodness, in Nietzsche's view, has become a kind of self-satisfaction of the weak (lambs): yes, our lambs are fragile, but they are kinder than you (lions). While deconstructing the objective illusion of modern science and the illusion of moral goodness of Europeans since the Middle Ages, Nietzsche also attacked romantic aesthetics: sentimental, pale, pure beauty or "art for art's sake", and became a victim of Nietzsche's resistance to Wagner's personal charm.
After Nietzsche in the later period, the master of thought who belongs to the same trench as Plato and Hegel is undoubtedly Heidegger. In the "Postscript" of his famous speech "The Origin of Works of Art", he asked: "Although we can confirm that since Hegel gave his last aesthetic lecture at Berlin University in the winter of 1828-1829, we have seen many new works of art and new artistic trends; However, we can't avoid Hegel's judgment in the above proposition. Hegel never wanted to deny that there might be new works of art and artistic trends of thought. However, the question still exists. Is art still a basic and inevitable way of occurrence of the decisive truth of our historical existence? Or, art is no longer like this? " On the surface, after Hegel announced the end of art, the art world was still very lively, the art movement was surging, and art theories came one after another. However, if we stop to think about it carefully, we will find that Hegel's proposition is not as absurd as people first felt. Heidegger obviously inherited Hegel's subtle ideological heritage and activated people's thinking about the essential relationship between poetry and truth in the new period. Of course, in Heidegger's view, it really means to uncover or open, which is different from Hegel's idea (or spirit). But the overall spirit of their thinking about art is the same, so they keep asking about the essence of art until the existing artistic phenomena show their pale prototype. In Plato's view, if art cannot reveal the truth, it must be exiled; In Hegel's view, if art is no longer the highest expression of spirit, it will become a dispensable ornament hanging on the wall; In Heidegger's view, if art can't be "a basic and inevitable way of occurrence with decisive truth for our historical existence", then there must be something wrong with art, and Hegel was the first to realize this problem and issue an early warning.
In a sense, what is Sartre's writing? It constitutes a popular version of some of Heidegger's thoughts. Although the "existentialism" after Sartre's Romanticism is no longer Heidegger's original meaning, Heidegger himself has clearly pointed this out. However, Sartre's writing style of emphasizing "intervention" still belongs to the ideological line from Plato, through Hegel and then to Heidegger. Especially when writing becomes a way to defend or advocate a way of life, and literature becomes a positive way to shape individual existence and symbiotic social form, people can easily see Plato's ghost flashing.
Kafka is considered as one of the greatest writers in the 20th century. He is often called the "Three Masters" with Proust and Joyce, and he may be the greatest among them. Bloom, an American scholar, believes that most great writers in the world cannot avoid the law of establishing their literary status by competing with their predecessors. However, Kafka seems to be an exception. Writing has surpassed the humanistic and religious significance of "immortal events" for him. Therefore, although any of Kafka's novels can't be compared with Proust and Joyce in aesthetic quality, he has surpassed Proust and Joyce in writing several short stories and a large number of aphorisms, becoming an "fable" of an era (in the best sense of this word). For Kafka, writing is a kind of prayer. He said: "Prayer, art and scientific research. These are three different flames from the same fire source. At this moment, people should transcend the possibility of expressing their own will and cross the boundaries of themselves. Prayer and art just reach out to the dark hand. People ask for gifts. " However, this does not mean that Kafka advocates that art does not need to hone skills, let alone that form is irrelevant, but that skills and forms do not come from artificial creation and ingenuity, but from a higher source, that is truth. Therefore, Kafka explicitly opposed the poet's clever use to please readers. When criticizing Apollinaire's poems, he said, "I am against any practice." Experts are superior to things because of the skill of liars. But can writers be above things? Can't! He was attracted by the world he experienced and described, just as God was attracted by his creation. He separated it from him in order to get rid of it. This is not an exercise. This is a birth, a reproduction of life, just like any birth. "
Kafka opposed the French poet Apollinaire, but he would definitely agree with the German poet Rilke. Although Rilke didn't come up with the idea that poetry is a "big charity" until his later years, his achievements in life are undoubtedly consistent with the idea that poetry is the reappearance of life. This is not to say that Rilke neglected the training of poetic skills. In fact, a large number of his poems (especially the most famous "writing poems") must be regarded as a deliberate exercise of skills, just like those great artists. However, in the same way, Rilke did not think that this kind of tempering could guarantee great poetry. He wrote in the poem: "If you just catch what you throw,/it's nothing, it's just a trick; -/Only when you catch it/Eternal God/with a precise wave, with a magical arc/something is thrown at you,/can this be considered a skill,-/But it is not your skill, but the power of a certain world. "
Kafka and Rilke are both reminiscent of Plato's poetic concept of spiritual possession, rather than Aristotle's poetic thought in the sense of production. It is true that we are not here to promote Plato's ancient concept of creation, but the opinions of great thinkers and poets are always beyond the general understanding of ordinary people. It is this sense of awe that makes us constantly feel the surprise and gratitude brought by literature.
It must be said that contemporary writers Rorty and Eagleton are also such thinkers. Rorty, in particular, has strong sympathy for Bloom's concern that the department of literature in American universities is evolving into the department of cultural studies, because literary classics are being deconstructed and literary aesthetics are being replaced by literary sociology and literary politics. Rorty agrees with Bloom that many promising young literature teachers laugh at everything, have no hope, explain everything and have no respect. They turned literary research into "another boring social science" and turned the literature department into a closed academic backwater. Rorty also admitted Bloom's worry: after the department of literature became the department of cultural studies, the original intention of the department of cultural studies was to engage in some much-needed political research, but in the end it might just teach students how to vent their dissatisfaction in jargon. In this sense, Rorty and Bloom belong to the same camp: they recognize the enlightenment value of literary classics and oppose the reduction of literary research to pure academic industry and knowledge production. But in another sense, Rorty's pragmatism makes him different from Bloom's nostalgic classical humanism. One of Rorty's most famous propositions, "Democracy precedes philosophy", is the best explanation.
It is on this issue that Eagleton became the representative of the school of literary and cultural studies. At the end of last century, when Eagleton wrote a postscript (1996) for his best-selling book Literary Theory: An Introduction, he could declare that "cultural theory may have won a battle" and "there is no neutral or innocent reading for a work of art". Eagleton's implication is that any literary work must be interpreted as an ideological or power struggle: either a class struggle or a gender struggle; It is either a struggle between colonialism and anti-colonialism, or a struggle of ethnic minorities or people with special tendencies. Of course, Russian formalism, British and American new criticism, French structuralism and semiotics will not admit this. Now, let's hear their voices.
They get authority from Aristotle, who is one of the sources of classical thought. In their view, poetry and all works of art in a broad sense do not come from some kind of intellectual absence and spiritual ecstasy, but from a clear rational and clear production process. By analyzing this process, people can not only grasp the law, but also appreciate the final result-works. We can find that Eliot, a modern poet, clearly holds an Aristotle concept. Eliot insists that poetry is not the product of romantic passion and mysterious inspiration, but the result of sober conception and careful production. They can be analyzed and predicted. These thoughts undoubtedly opened the way for British and American new criticism.
Generally speaking, Cahill belongs to Kant's ideological tradition. When Kant regarded the innate space-time form and intellectual category as the basic forms of cognition, Cahill transformed Kant's thought into a "cultural-symbolic structure" and emphasized the constructive role of this structure in human experience. Although it is not difficult to classify Cahill as an artistic independent, his tendency on this literary issue is very clear. When opposing romanticism and the later concept of "art for art's sake", he said: "Even in lyric poetry, emotion is not the only and decisive feature. Of course, there is no doubt that great lyric poets have the deepest feelings. An artist without strong feelings can't create anything except superficial and frivolous art, but from this fact, we can't draw the conclusion that the role of lyric poetry and general art can be said to be the artist's ability to pour out feelings. " He went on to point out that if an artist focuses on his own happiness or "sad happiness" instead of observing and creating various forms, he is a sentimental person. He lost no time in quoting Malamei's famous slogan: "Poetry is not written with thoughts, but with words." Creation is like this, and so is appreciation. Cassirer pointed out that "to some extent, if we don't repeat and reconstruct the creative process of a work of art, we can't understand it", thus clearly attributing him to Aristotle's tradition of emphasizing the generation of poetry.
It was the great novelist Proust who opened the way for French new criticism. Proust's theoretical debater is Saint-Beaufort,/kloc-one of the most famous French literary critics in the 9th century. Saint beaufort, to some extent, represents the literary criticism tradition of19th century, which is basically biographical criticism with a strong taste of vulgar sociology. This vulgar sociology regards the writer's life and background of the times as the main conditions for defining the content of literary works, and takes the writer's subjective intention as the objective meaning of the works. Proust refuted the Saint-beaufort equation by distinguishing the writer's "self in real society" and "the second self in creation". His thoughts are very important. Like Eliot, it almost became the core idea of literary theory that dominated the first half of the 20th century.
Russian formalism, close reading of texts, British and American new criticism, European semiotics and French structuralism almost dominated the literary criticism from the first half of the 20th century to the 1960s. In this trend, Nabokov deserves to be one of the representatives. His representativeness lies not in his theoretical achievements, but in his most successful intensive reading and new criticism practice. As long as you have read the Literature Lecture Notes, you can prove that this statement is correct. This book has become a masterpiece in the analysis of European novels that almost no one can match. Look at the way he is always willing to explain, such as Flaubert's hairstyle of Emma (Madame Bovary), we can understand the theoretical essence of close reading and the new criticism of Britain and America. Nabokov insists that literature is a myth, not an ideology, and that novels should not preach, readers should not identify with and empathize with characters, and advanced aesthetic enjoyment can only come from paying attention to the details and structure of works. In this regard, Nabokov's most famous sentence is: "Style and structure are the essence of a book, and great ideas are just empty nonsense."
Kundera, who mocked the "great idea" to the extreme, undoubtedly belonged to this camp. His famous saying "God laughs when human beings think" clearly shows this point. This is not to say that Kundera despises all ideas. No, he has great respect for truly great original ideas. What he despises is only those seemingly mysterious and pretentious pseudo-thoughts of human beings. He renamed this thought and its attitude "kitsch". Similar to Nabokov's emphasis on the details and structure of the text, Kundera is obsessed with small wit and humor, strongly opposes grand narrative, and is keen on the interest, irony and sublimity of "secondary" life. These thoughts make him a model of "postmodern" novelist.
If Kundera is a model of postmodern novelists, then roland barthes is a model of postmodern critics. His zero-degree writing is obviously aimed at Sartre's viewpoint of intervening in literature. He insisted that writing should not be involved, but should be a "signifier game"; Only in this way can writers get rid of ideological preaching completely and enjoy the pure "happiness of writing", which not only makes Barthes produce a series of ingenious works full of ingenuity, but also encourages a large number of unintelligible text experiments in French and even European literary circles. The person who achieved the highest in these experiments even became an academician of the French Academy. However, as Saul Bellow, an American writer, said, such literary attempts are doomed to be lifeless and short-lived, because they contain too little human experience to resonate with readers.
However, Bart is not short of admirers. Susan sontag in the United States thinks that Barthes will live forever (not an academician of the French Academy). This young rebellious and talented woman writer is famous in academic circles with the slogan of "opposing interpretation". Why do you object to the explanation? Because the explanation is too rational, people are deprived of the sensory enjoyment of artistic works. Therefore, Sontag advocates replacing the hermeneutics of art with the colorilogy of art, and she opposes over-interpretation of the text, thus safeguarding her rights. She advocates the avant-garde of art, which is not in the sense of Biegel, a famous German aesthete. She is an artistic self-disciplinarian. As far as she spares no effort to advocate the potential of cultural politics and cultural transformation of society, she is also an artistic functionalist. We call the former Sontag I and the latter Sontag II.
Obviously, from the perspective of opposing unrestricted cultural research and cultural interpretation of literary works, Yale scholar Bloom has something in common with Sontag I. However, no matter in personal temperament or academic tradition, there are no more heterogeneous figures than Bloom and Sontag (whether Sontag I or Sontag II). At the end of the 20th century, Bloom brought the old debate about the nature of literature to the latest form. This debate is between him and what he thinks are "haters". The so-called "resentment school" refers to cultural researchers, deconstructionists, feminists, Marxists and post-colonial critics of literature. In his view, these people are unscrupulously deconstructing literary classics, and literary reading has become an activity to find evidence of class struggle, European white male centralism and its imperialist hegemony. In this regard, Bloom pointed out that "aesthetics is only a personal concern, not a social concern" and sounded the horn of a classical humanist: "Shakespeare or Cervantes, Homer or Dante, Chaucer or rabelais, the real function of reading their works is to enhance their inner self-growth. Studying the classics in depth will not make people better or worse, nor will citizens become more useful or harmful. Self-dialogue of the mind is not a social reality in essence. The whole meaning of western classics is to let people make good use of their loneliness. The ultimate form of this loneliness is the encounter between a person and his own death. "
In our list, Kant and Adorno are two complicated examples, which cannot be simply classified. It is generally believed that Kant systematically demonstrated the autonomy of interest for the first time and put forward the proposition that aesthetics does not involve utility, interest judgment is universal and inevitable, and beauty is close to artistic autonomy in form. This is indeed the first part of Critique of Critical Forces, especially the basic conclusion of Analysis of Beauty. However, this is only Kant on the surface. A close reading of Kant's entire third criticism and an investigation of his third judgments in all his works reveal that Kant also has a deep motive, that is, to put the fully demonstrated autonomy of interests in the overall blueprint of enlightenment, thus putting forward the proposition that "beauty is a symbol of moral goodness". The basic meaning of this proposition is not that beauty is based on moral goodness (which will conflict with his conclusion that beauty lies in form), but that aesthetic judgment and moral judgment are isomorphic, because it has no utilitarian and free characteristics and is conducive to moral construction. Because of this, "beauty is in form" (the independent proposition of interests) and "beauty is a symbol of moral goodness" are not contradictory, but treat each other dialectically. Imagine, if there is no autonomy of interests (freedom of interest judgment), how can beauty become a symbol of moral goodness? On the other hand, if it is useless to care for human beings at a higher level-morality, then will aesthetics be reduced to "art for art's sake" and "boring" as Kant said?
Only in this way can we understand the good intentions of Adorno, one of Kant's successors. All Adorno's aesthetic thoughts (especially concentrated in his masterpiece Aesthetic Theory in his later years) are trying to realize the harmony between Kant and Hegel, and the harmony between artistic autonomy and artistic social function. Like Kant, Adorno is a staunch artistic independent first, so he will strongly criticize popular art as a cultural industry and "obedience literature" as an ideological sermon, thus clearly distinguishing himself from Benjamin. However, Adorno is not a pure artistic independent. Adorno understands that artistic creation, as a kind of spiritual production, can be divorced from the general material production environment, or completely unrelated to the spiritual atmosphere of an era (or ideology for short). Adorno's conclusion is that, in the words of American writer Hemingway, art is "beauty under pressure". Pressure is all the material and spiritual living conditions imposed on artists, and beauty is a new form realized by artists through squeezing, deforming, crushing and reorganizing established artistic language under such conditions.
Therefore, Plato, Hegel, later Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, Kafka, Rilke, Sontag II, Rorty and Eagleton formed the first phalanx in the author list of our Collection of Literary Theories. Aristotle, Nietzsche, Eliot, Cassirer, Proust, Nabokov, Kundera, Barthes, Sontag I and Bloom form the second phalanx. Both sides originated from Plato and Aristotle, the sources of western thought, and ended in Eagleton and Bloom, two academic schools that spoke their own words at the end of the 20th century. Of course, contemporary cultural researchers do not necessarily agree with Bloom's "lemming-like" image, and one after another fell into the depths of the cliff, and many literary independents in history did not fully agree. It is only convenient for us to sort out the above two squares and let the vague literary theory see a clear outline.
Our intention is not only to simply clean up and end the legacy of literary theory, but also to advocate a simpler compromise and reconciliation of the fundamental differences between the two sides. Because, instead of acknowledging this cheap treatment, it is better to agree with "one-sided profundity." Of course, we should also be alert to all kinds of paranoid tendencies. For example, when we realize the essential relationship between "poetry and truth", we should also realize its danger, especially when "revolution obeys literature" and "socialist realism" gradually evolve into "main melody melody"; Similarly, we should be wary of another tendency, especially when the theory of literary autonomy gradually evolves into "literary ontology", asserting that "language is everything" and "nothing outside the text" with an artificial and pretentious expert attitude, and talking about the detailed analysis of pronunciation, intonation, rhythm, reference and structure, while ignoring the most basic thoughts and feelings of the works. Because, as we know, great literary works transcend style and even language. This point, as the famous French writer mauriac said, "We can all feel Tolstoy's greatness, but few people know Tolstoy by reading Russian directly." Admittedly, we must say that Tolstoy's translation must have suffered a lot, but we can also say categorically that even with the help of translation, we can appreciate Tolstoy's greatness; Moreover, Tolstoy is not a master of style, which does not prevent him from being a great writer, perhaps the greatest writer in the19th century.