A Research Of Yu-kung Kao's Chinese Lyric Tradition

This paper researches the Chinese Lyric Tradition opened out by Yu-kung Kao, a Chinese professor of Princeton University, and acts as a reference for Chinese aesthetics history writting. The Chinese aesthetic histories written by domestic scholars are not very fine because of the behindhand methodology. Yu-kung Kao fused several western methodology and used it to open out the Chinese Lyric Tradition, which affected a lot of American and Taiwanese scholars.Yu-kung Kao's Chinese lyric aesthetics included the construction of theory and the criticism of genres. He built a theory first, to explain the aesthetic significance of Chinese Lyric Tradition and to establish its basic approaches. At the same time, he made a frame to put in both Chinese and western aesthetics mainstream. By the foundation of it, he developed symbolization, the central conception of lyric theory, to infer the lyric ideal of each genres in Chinese aesthetic history. The music theory in Xian Qin and the literature theory in the Six Dynasties were considered to be the bud of Chinese Lyric Tradition because of its symbolic significance. The regulated verses and calligraphy in T'ang were respective considered to be the representations of artistic conception and vigour, two types of lyric aesthetics. The landscape painting were considered to be the continuing of artistic conception, and the Chinese brush drawing were considered to be the continuing of vigour. The intellectual painting, which represented the confluence of Chinese Lyric Tradition, were considered to be the combination of artistic conception and vigour.This paper puts forward that, Yu-kung Kao used structuralist linguistics as a technique to research the Chinese aesthetics, showing out the particularity of Chinese aesthetics contrasting with western aesthetics, and explaining a lot of art phenomenons. However, the preexistent theory and the hypothetic historical view also made several errors on the details of aesthetics history. For example, the music theory in Xian Qin mainly treated of the symbolization of collective will but not personal experience, so that it didn't accord with lyric aesthetics. The regulated verse was a musical art, the most outstanding seven-character line regulated verse had strong historical situation, formally spreading space-time imagination without any nonobjective symbolization. The cavalier perspective of landscape painting was to be eliminate the limitation of individual, and revert phenomenons in consciousness, but not rebuilt images mental space. So while the west thoery is important, the textual research of datum and the recovering of history are the essential requests of aesthetic history researching. Yu-kung Kao didn't do very well in this aspect. We should learn his production and then beyond it to push the research of Chinese aesthetics history.