新中国六十年新批评研究

新批评是20世纪形式文论大潮中一个重要派别,其理论遗产至今影响深远。某些新批评派领袖人物长期居住在中国,与中国知识界关系密切。20世纪30年代中国现代文论形成时,特别重视新批评;20世纪80年代“方法论热”中,新批评的地位最为突出;20世纪90年代以来,新批评的研究在中国向纵深发展,渐渐融入中国文论的基矗在当今学界推进批评理论的努力中,重估新批评在中国的历史是很有必要的。

The New Criticism in New China

Literary theorists in China today can’t afford to ignore the New Criticism,because it is as important as any other school that has once been influential.Many of the concepts and ideas of the New Criticism have already been integrated into the foundation of the Critical Theory today.I.A.Richards’s discussion on the meaning of meaning,for instance,is still being discussed in semiotics.Some of the methods endorsed by the New Critics,close reading for an example,are among the basic methods of present-day literary criticism.The New Criticism has been particularly remembered in China,because some leading figures of this school were closely related to China.I.A.Richards visited China for 6 times,and died when lecturing in China in 1979.William Empson joined the China’s South-Western Union University that exiled to the mountainous regions during the Anti-Japanese War,and had been staying with Beijing University until the Communists took over.They are all legends in the history of modern Chinese academia. China started to introduce the New Criticism as early as it was first proposed.Richards’ Science and Poetry was translated into Chinese in the same year when it was published in the United Kingdom.In the 1930s,a large amount of the works of the New Critics were translated that helped to arouse the first high tide of modernist criticism in China. Unfortunately,the New Criticism disappeared completely in China for almost 30 years afterwards.Only in the early 1960’s,a range of the most important works of the New Critics were re-interpreted as ″materials of bourgeois ideas to be criticized″,which was yet cut short by the Cultural Revolution.In the so-called New Period starting from the end of the 1970s,windows were opened to foreign ideas,and the Chinese academia embraced all kinds of ″new″ schools.The New Criticism was warmed welcomed back.A large number of translations and studies were produced that stirred up great upheavals in Chinese critical circles.For instance,Rene Wellek’s idea of dividing literary criticism into ″Extrinsic″ and ″Intrinsic″ might be seen as a compromise in the West,but it has justified formal studies in China where studies of the form had been frowned at as ″reactionary″ for decades.In the 1980s,some people really regarded the return of the New Criticism to China as a great threat,while others were cheering the arrival of a storm of change.That kind of attention was,perhaps,beyond the widest expectations of the New Critics themselves. Since the 1990s,however,the discussion about the New Criticism has quieted down.Its influence is now no longer sensational but its studies have been reaching for the depths.The interest of the Chinese academia in the New Criticism has turned into an intellectual pursuit.Today,the ″New Critical type″ of criticism can still be seen frequently,which proves that this school is still useful in contemporary literary criticism in China.