A Research Of Stephen Owen's Study On The Poetry History And Poetics Of The Tang Dinasty

American Sinologist,Prof.Stephen Owen's study on the poetry history and poetics of the Tang dinasty,taking the Mid-Tang as the demarcation line,divides the Tang poetry history in two periods,the Early and the High Tang;the Mid- and the Late Tang.The poetry of the High Tang represents the nonfictional Chinese poetry tradition:poetry of this period is the record of the real experience of a true world,not apart from daily life.The development of the poetry of the Early Tang into that of the High Tang is a process of poetry's nonfictionalization and contextualization.By the Mid-Tang emerges western Art,which is separated from daily life.Poetry becomes a separate sphere,a vocation in its own right.Vocational poets group appear.Poetry is an art rather than a transparent adjunct to experience.Natural category,the Chinese poetic thinking method,as an important argument of the poetic development from a record of historical experience to creation,changes "categorical correspondences" into a willful act of analogy.If we say Stephen Owen carries out a comparable and complemental tactics between the Chinese and the West,nonfictional and fictional poetics in his study of the poetry of the Early and the High Tang,a corresponding tactics is adopted in his study of the poetry of the Mid-Tang and the Late Tang.There are two major problems in his study of the poetry of the Tang dinasty.One is methodlogical contradiction.In his first two books,The Poetry of the Early Tang and The Poetry of the High Tang,he studies the conventions,norms and rules of the style of this period with the New Criticism's interior literary historical view and the Structuralism method.In The End of the Chinese "Middle Ages":Essays in Mid-Tang Literary Culture,he adopts a comparable view of the end of the Middle Ages and a vision of modernity.In The Late Tang:Chinese Poetry of the Mid-Ninth Century(827-860),he emphasizes the context of contemporary poetry and the problems of manuscript culture.His changeable points make his theoretical position unsteady and probably contradictory.The other is his hidden West position,which may bring cultural misreading and eurocentrism tendency.He tends to explain natural analogy in sense of Confucianism,marginalizes or ignores the marginal culture influence of Tao/Zhuangzi,Xuan,Chan on the poetic aesthetic experience,and sometimes he can't grasp the spirit of the Chinese traditional poetry with the western interpretative method.All of these makes his conclusion of the poetics progress from a record of historical experience to creation inevitably has a hidden western poetic characteristic.