Discourse Upon Stephen Owen's Researching Mehhods Of The Mid-Tang Literature

Compared with the domestic Mid-Tang literature research and Stephen Owen's early studies, there is a breakthrough in Stephen's methodology:Firstly, in accordance with the complexity and diversity of the Mid-Tang poetries and proses, Stephen advocates to get through all styles, to extend research views to poetries, proses and other involved cultural discourses,and to focus on internal relations of various forms and tendencies. Based on those above, Stephen re-demarcates the boandary between the High-Tang and Mid-Tang, and inspects all the Mid-Tang literary forms from visual angles of the main body, writing mode, writing feature, and literary theories to reveal the literary characteristics of the Mid-Tang and summarize clues of inner relations.Secondly, Stephen Owen exerts "Mid-Tang centered ideas" creatively, inspecting the Mid-Tang literature in the changing course of literary history, by contrasting which to the High-Tang literature, having marked the individual interpretation and part against whole as characters of the Mid-Tang literature.Stephen attributes the new change of the Mid-Tang literature to the awakening of subjectivity, which deserves attentions for his innovation of the perspective and content, but his studies in the spirit of the Mid-Tang are actually Taylor's "self as the result of displacement. Stephen used Ku-Yin to explain the transmimetic aesthetic , it was helpful to grasp the link between the Mid-Tang poetry style and aesthetic theory, but his western poetics discourses went away from China's aesthetic experience when treating the transmimetic aesthetic as merely skills.