The Fourth Kind Of Criticism

"The Fourth Kind of Criticism" is put fourth based on the three kinds ofcriticism concepts of Albert Thibaudet, a French scholar. This dissertation believesthat there exists "The Fourth Kind of Criticism" besides Media Criticism, ScholarCriticism and Autheur Criticism. That is the criticism of an "autheur-scholar", who isan author as well as a scholar. "The Fourth Kind of Criticism" has a long history inChinese and western criticism history, which has a far-reaching effect. However, itattracts little attention and draws few researches in both Chinese and westernacademic circles. This dissertation is trying to fill this blank.This dissertation is divided into three parts: introduction, main body and epilogue.The introduction elaborates on the disseration's purpose, in face of frustrated andmultifaceted discourses of China's current literature critisism, of searching for newpossibilities for builiding systems for current Chinese criticism and for local discourseof criticism.The main body is composed of two parts. Part I focuses on the construction oftheories, which explores the historical and current conditions of "The Fourth Kind ofCriticism" so as to generalize the characteristics of the fourth criticism.The firstchapter, by review of definition and history of criticism, reveals that an ideal mode ofcriticism should not only shoulder the responsibility of cultural interpretation but alsoartistic judgement. Chapter two puts forth the legitimacy of having critic's "role"features as categorical standards and provieds clear definition for "the fourthcriticism" in both broad and narrow sense, by introducing 3 kinds of criticism andreviewing western literature criticism in the 20th century. Chapter 3 discusses thefeatures of the fourth criticism through its criticizing position, academic sources,criticizing methods and style of writing. Chpater 4 reviews the position and influenceof the fourth criticism in China's whole history of literature development and analyzesreason of its discontinuity in modern China, as well as negative impact brought bythat.Part II focuses on "The Fourth Kind of Criticism" in the contemporary literatureof China. And three representative cases, Gefei, Wenxuan Cao and Dachun Zhang areanalyzed in this part, which expounds their critique ideas and theory contributions.Chapter 5 reviews Gefei's literature critique theories in the past ten years and revealsthe process of forming his own critique concepts. Chapter 6 elaborates on the artisticand philosophical ontology, literature values and arts of fiction of Cao Wenxuan.Chapter 7 gives an all-round analysis on Zhang Dachun's fiction theory andgeneralizes his ideas on fiction aesthetics and writing skills.In the epilogue part, it is stressed that the fourth criticism should convergedifferent kinds of criticism and it is value-laden while having in-depth interpretationfunction, is of both scholarly and authorly temperament. In face of current trend ofcriticism neglecting artistic, aesthetic and literature features, the fourth criticism willmake up for the lack of criticism from literature perspective. However, all kinds ofcriticism work within their own paradigms and will be constrained by them, all ofwhich will have their own legitimacy and rationality. Therefore, advocating the fourthcriticism doesn't mean to vote out the others. An ideal system of literature criticismshould still go as Thibaudet said, a "republic of co-existence and counter-balances" .