The Study Of The Ideas On Style Of Six Dynasties

The thought of style has its profound tradition in ancient literature theory. Although the traditional study of stylistics has becoming a hot topic and achieved lots of breakthrough recently in the academia, it is much more valuable to be drilled down to. The ideas on style of Chinese have a process of occurring and developing. In Six Dynasties the ancient thought of style made its main content and primitive framework formed and took shape, laying a foundation for the principles and theoretic appearance of latter researches of style. Meanwhile, the style of Six Dynasties is the core problem of the literature theory of Six Dynasties. Therefore the ideas on style of Six Dynasties provide us with a perfect entry point to research on the ancient theory of style and the literature theory of Six Dynasties. The comprehensive and complete understanding and explaining of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties can not only offer a brand new perspective of theoretic research on comprehending and elaborating the literature theory of Six Dynasties but also promote the introspection and development of the traditional study of the thought of style. Furthermore, it supplies the local resources and historical reference for preliminarily structuring of stylistics of Chinese. Because of the reasons above, this thesis taking the theory of western modern stylistics as a reference and comparing perspective studies the style of Six Dynasties independently. The author tries to explain the ideas on style of Six Dynasties holistically so as to describe and assess roundly the theoretic value and significance of the thought of style of Six Dynasties. The essay consists of five parts.In the first part, the author examines the social and cultural context where the ideas on style of Six Dynasties occurred. In the history of Chinese literature, the writers of Six Dynasties tended to emphasize the form of their works. From the flowery poems and odes in Jian'an literature and the ethereal and gorgeous diction in the literature of Western Jin Dynasty to the glorious rhetoric in the Southern Dynasties, the literary creation paid more and more attention on carving the language expression such as fine words, antithesis, rhythm, and illusion. However, no matter it is in Qi and Liang Dynasties or in Sui and Tang Dynasties or in recent years, people guided by the literature conception of Confucian "literature for moral instruction", have been criticizing frequently the refined sculpture of words and sentences of Six Dynasties. Why the formal tendency of writing in an ornate style appeared in Six Dynasties? The answer involves the internal development discipline of the literature itself and also concerns the social and cultural influence. In the first part of this paper, the author mainly inspects the occurring of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties for the purposes of studying the intricate and varied fields'linked by style such as history, reality, thought, culture, literature theory and so on, and look into the historic and cultural context of the " presenting with such a posture"-ideas on style of Six Dynasties. In order to give a reasonable explanation of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties, the author focuses on the angels of social political situation and the background of ideology and culture to explore the causes of appearing and changing of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties.As to the social political situation, this thesis analyses in detail from the following two points:one is the composition and transition of the intellectuals, in particularly, the formation and changes of status of the powerful families which directly influenced the appearing and transforming of the contemporary ideas on style. The other is the social unrest and constant cultural persecution resulting in the tendency of writing formalism and the internal veer of the literary thinking, making the study of style a prevailing topic. At the same time, this essay attempts to explain the occurring of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties through the background of the philosophy thought of Six Dynasties. The profound background of the philosophy thought' revolution of Six Dynasties immediately inspired the linguistic veer of literature from two aspects. On one hand, it's the lingual strategy in the indigenization of metaphysical philosophy and Buddhism. On the other hand, it tells the philosophy of Wei-Jin Dynasties rejected the thought of "feelings being evil" in the argument on the temperament of Han Dynasty and laid an ideological base for the literary theory of "feelings rooting in poetry". The interactions of these two aspects made the ontological features of the literature which centers on the poems and odes clearer and clearer from the view of linguistic form.In the second part, it analyzes the connotation of the conception of style of Six Dynasties. After a systematic study of the historical culture context where the ideas on style of Six Dynasties appeared, the author tries to sort out all-roundly the notion of style in Six Dynasties.Firstly, research on the scope of style etymologically and semantically. By examining the historic transition of the meaning of literature, it is confirmed that the literature of Six Dynasties centered on the appreciation of beauty. So it valued emotion and literature and had a connotation of pure literature. The word "style" stands for "literature" and "form". It indicates the literary formal structure of language and belongs to the category of literary form. With the concept of pure literature of Six Dynasties becoming more and more distinct, literary study had turned its focus from external witness-position to internal peculiarity researching. Consequently, the concept of style became a key term of the literary theory of Six Dynasties and the research on style proved to be a hot topic in literary theory. The popularity of the senses of style in return symbolizes the literary thought of Six Dynasties on the way to intuition.Secondly, analyze the characteristics of the notion of style. Literature is an art of language. The cognition of its features and specialties both base on the definition and understanding of the literary language. The conception of style at the very beginning relates to the form of the literary language, and the ancient research on style focuses on the linguistic discussion of how to say. That is called the features of linguistic ontologism. By examining the relationship between style and language, the thesis highlights the dimensions of linguistic explanations of the style of Six Dynasties.Etymologically, "style" comes from the human body which consists of twelve meridians and collaterals and refers to the existence of the article or literature. So it implies that the notion of style has a similar organic completeness with human beings aiming at presenting the connotation of the completeness of the passage. Therefore, the style of Chinese local context, though based on language, is not a linguistic concept. It points to the essence of appreciation of beauty and makes the connotation of style a multi-factorial and organic whole. The organic and all-over characteristics of the style of Six Dynasties looks at not only the completeness of the notion of style itself but also the explanation of the unity of the literary elements which are combined by style and involves the essence of the relation between emotion and collection. Through the relations between style and sentiment, the essay highlights the feature of comprehensiveness of the concept of style of Six Dynasties.The semantic and characteristic analyses of the conception of style of Six Dynasties aim at rectifying its foundation and clarifying the simplified understanding and formalized misreading of style from conceptual angel. This offers a conceptual tool for elaborating the thought of style of Six Dynasties.In the third part, the author describes the main connotation and characteristics of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties. After a concrete discrimination about the connotation and features of the notion of style of Six Dynasties, the paper pays much attention on the formation of the thought of style of Six Dynasties.Sentiment contained in the word and affection contained in the voice are two features of the aesthetical poetry. Sentiment contained in the word relates more to meaning but affection contained in the voice relates more to rhetoric. Meaning belongs to the category of correctitude which is up to the Confucian standards of uprightness and the poetry principles of gentle and honest. And feelings belong to the rhetoric which emphasizes the motivation of aesthetics for a touching emotion. As a result, having a poetic mood does not necessarily mean it is a good poem. There must be an artistic uniqueness of "producing vividness with the affection contained in the voice" and "always being moving and lofty and affection contained in the voice overwhelming the poetry". And the research on this artistic uniqueness is the main connotation of the thought of style of Six Dynasties and also owns to the prominent contribution of it. The ideas on style of Six Dynasties stress the form of style, its aesthetic effects and the expressing function which emphasize the motivation of aesthetics for a touching emotion. When the critics in Six Dynasties studied comprehensively the writers, literary works, and certain linguistic patterns of sounds and shapes of some literary genre, they often refer to the inherent character of the emotion and the feelings expressed. Hence the thought of style of Six Dynasties focuses on the form of language and features with the formalization of linguistic ontology. Meanwhile it can not be regarded as a single linguistic analyzing system but it is a substantial form composed of feelings and dictions which reveals its feature of organic completeness.In the third chapter, the paper discusses the beauty of patterns of sounds and shapes of the literary language of Six Dynasties. The author elaborates the relationship between it and the expression of Chinese and the effects and expressive functions brought out by their relationship. The purpose is to show the main connotation and theoretic features of the thought of style of Six Dynasties and to boost a deeper comprehension of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties.In the forth part, the essay talks about the theoretic meaning of the thought of style of Six Dynasties. The three parts above mostly analyze the essential problems of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties, but in chapter five, the author turns to research on the influence of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties.Firstly, the forth part studies the literary theory of Six Dynasties from the vision of style. The literary theory of Six Dynasties is connected with style, language and many other literary forms in all the aspects. Language and style are the core of the literary theory of Six Dynasties, and they relates to every issue of literature and have a fundamental status. A literary theorist whoever he is, their ideas of writing, appreciating and criticizing theory, conception to the literature, historical opinion of literature and other key problems which concern literature all can be derived from its conception of style. Therefore the notion of style is regarded as the key point and important reference angel of understanding and commenting the concept of style of Six Dynasties. This chapter taking "style" as a concept-analysis-tool examines systematically the issues such as literary criticism from the perspective of the style of Six Dynasties which offers a new observing and comparing scope for describing and judging the literary theory of Six Dynasties.Secondly,the forth part tells how the thought of style of Six Dynasties enlightens the structure of Chinese stylistics. In the western literary theory of the 20th century, the research on the form of art once has been the main stream. By contrast, the study of style in literary theory in China seems to be weak. Because there don't exist any formal aesthetics forged by Chinese people. We can just borrow the western literary theory of forms to analyze the Chinese literary works. However, since the Chinese literature depends on Chinese which has no independent tense system, the literary frameworks and analytic ways of the western formal aesthetics can not provide persuasive summaries and aptly explanations for the formal features of Chinese literature. Because lacking of the theoretic results of formal study based on the literary works of our own nationality, we sometimes copy mechanically and misread about the western formal aesthetics, and we can not even interact with them efficiently. As a result, forging a literary theory of forms with unique national features is an important and serious theoretic subject.The study of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties not only shares a similar analytic scope of language with literary theory of western modern formalism, but also has researched sufficiently on the poetic characteristics of Chinese, the form of style and the pattern of expression of Chinese literature. Hence it provides rich theory resources for the analysis and study of style of Chinese literature.This thesis studies the enlightening meaning of the ideas on style of Six Dynasties to the structuring of Chinese stylistics. It isn't mired in the details mechanically, but stresses the theoretic reference value of its problem awareness, thoughts and methods and in particularly its significance in methodology which presents in the analytic vision of language and the holistic research mode. On this ground, the author puts forward a primary idea of building the Chinese stylistics of which linguistics and poetics interpret mutually. And the author presents some preliminary statements as well.