LIU HSIEH AS LITERARY THEORIST, CRITIC, AND RHETORICIAN

Liu Hsieh's treatise on literature, entitled Dragoncarvings on the Literary Mind or Wen-hsin tiao-lung, completed before A.D. 502, has always enjoyed a preeminent position in the tradition of Chinese literary criticism. The dissertation attempts to introduce and examine, from a modern critical viewpoint, Liu Hsieh's literary theory of two-fold manifestation from the perspective of Liu-Hsieh- the-theorist, -the-critic, and -the-rhetorician. The dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter focuses on one aspect of the notion that literary work of art is comparable to an organism, i.e, the inseparability of form and content. Liu Hsieh, as a theorist, insists on the inseparability of form and content from both the perspective of form and content. The second chapter deals with the theoretical base of Liu Hsieh's theory of twofold manifestation, i.e., his theory of the creative act, and it concentrates on another characterization of organicism, i.e., the life-force which serves as a unifying force for the organism. An effort is made to strip all the mysteries surrounding such metaphysical terms as Tao (the Way), ch'i (the vital force), and chih (the will) by referring to the concrete creative act characterized in modern psychology and critical theory. The third chapter is to provide a systematic explication of stylistic terms such as t'i (body/substance/genre/style type), shih (force/stylistic force), feng (wind/mien/manner/appeal/ influence/expressiveness), and ku (bone/skeleton/structure/ well-structedness) in the context of Liu Hsieh's literary theory of the creative act. The last chapter deals with Liu Hsieh's maxims of composition, an analysis of which will be conducted from the perspective of E. D. Hirsch's concept of readability, and in so doing, one may gain valuable insight into the psychological bases of these maxims.