文学经典的生成谱系与传播机制

文学经典的生成是一个同时在时间和空间中展开的、持续不断地传播和被接受的过程。在此传播过程中,既有纯文学、纯学术的要素贯注其中,又有非文学、非经典的、世俗的力量介入其间。从这个意义上说,经典不是一个文本,而是一个 '场域'。在这个场域中,各种来自文学和非文学的力量形成的对话和张力使其意义得以生成、增殖和传播。在当下这个时代,我们只能从这个场域出发展开经典研究才能避免将文本细读与社会语境人为割裂的弊病,进而在文学与社会、精英与大众、商业与美学之间架起一座沟通的桥梁。

Genealogy and Communication Mechanisms of the Literary Canon

The generation of a literary canon is a continuous process of acceptance and communication in time and space ,in which both purely literary and academicelements as well as non-literary ,non-canonical and even secular powers are involved .Only by constant self-generation and self-enrichment through continuous absorption of the political and aesthetic energies from both the conventional and the elite ,can a literary text possibly become a classic .The task of genealogyis to demonstrate how a text is shaped in the historical process ,and to reveal how traces of meaning are inscribed in the text through dialogue or the wrestling of various energies within it .The tracking of complex routes in the generation of a literary canon should therefore be the starting point of genealogical analysis . A literary canon has strong diffusibility and absorptivity .It can absorb a text that predates it and make it an organic part of its own in the form of a pretext .During the process of dissemination it can inspire writers in their subsequent creation of a series of post-texts at different levels .Along the horizontal timeline ,any classic literary text has more than one pretext or non-text ,which might appear irrelevant and scattered without any sign of canonicity but has actually accumulated massive social and cultural narrative energy to constitute the preconditions for a classic literary text .Along the vertical axis of space ,we find that discourses in a classic text have at least three strata : the generally-accepted core text (or main text) ,the subtext and the hypertext ,etc . A literary canonin this senseis not an isolated or independent text but a group of texts or discourse relations ,or more precisely ,a″field ,″with fights and wrestles among various literary and non-literary powers withinit .It is these dialoguesand tensionscreatedin thefightsandwrestles that become the most fundamental and profound reasons for the formation and dissemination of a literary canon .A literary canon in this field not only undergoes the whole process from nascence at its birthplace to renaissance in a foreign context ,but also experiences transformation in different forms of media ,from oral ,written and printed to audio and visual texts .In the contemporary context ,only by seeing a text as a field ,by examining the inherited relations within a literary canon ,and by exploring the interactions between a literary canon ,the social discourse system ,and communication media ,can we truly appreciate the value and significance of a literary canon from the dialogue between texts ,from the dialogue between the carriers of different media within a text ,and from the dialogue andinteraction between texts and audience . From a methodological perspective ,the research into the genealogy and communication mechanisms of a literary canon also avoids an arbitrary split between the text and its contexts ,and builds a bridge between literature and the society ,the elite and the public as well as its commercial and aesthetic values .