Pondering And Poetry

The modern study of Chinese ancient poetics(CAP) has nearly gone through a hundred years of history since 1920's, which excavated poetics categories and thoughts deeply. While the study of the mode of Chinese poetics thinking and its influence on the mode of poetics discourse almost remains blank. This thesis attempts to explore the way of thinking that leads to the formation of Chinese poetics discourse, to trace the mode of thinking and discourse of CAP from the perspective of the way of thinking with the aim to reveal the inherent spirit and national characteristics of CAP and to provide some references for the reevaluation of CAP and the construction of contemporary literary theories.This thesis contains 3 parts: introduction, body and conclusion.The introduction part is the literature review which gives a detailed description about the 3 core categories—CAP, the mode of thinking of CAP and the mode of discourse of CAP. In addition a brief direction about the main questions, research goals as well as the methodology and significance of the thesis is given.The body contains 4 chapters.The first chapter discusses the influence of Chinese ancient language on the mode of thinking and the mode of discourse. It includes 2 sections which argue about the influence of the character and Chinese language on the mode of thinking and poetics discourse respectively. The argument reveals that Chinese ancient language enforced the image thinking, holistic thinking and correlative thinking in ancient times and influenced the poetics discourse.The core is made up of the second, the third and the forth chapter which discusses the influence of image thinking, holistic thinking and correlative thinking on poetics discourse respectively. Each chapter contains the origin and feature of each mode of thinking and its influence on poetics discourse as well as its merits and limitations. The argument makes it clear that the three main mode of thinking in Ancient China are the image thinking, holistic thinking and correlative thinking which influence the mode of CAP and brings the merits as well as the limitations.The fifth chapter is the reflection on the mode of thinking and discourse of CAP which contains 4 sections. The first section is about the poetic characteristics like the conciseness, implicitness, subjectivity, mobility and the homogeneousness of poetry and poetics. The second section is the analysis of limitations of CAP like simplicity, fuzziness and arbitrariness and looseness. The third section is a comparison of the mode of thinking and discourse between CAP and western poetics, which points out the differences on the mode of thinking, the mode of discourse and the form of knowledge. The last section is a discussion about the value and inspiration for contemporary literature draw from the ancient literature, putting forward that literature theory should be rooted in the literary practice and should be rich of poetic character.The conclusion is the summary of the thesis in which the contents and the conclusion, the innovation and the significance, the problems occurred during the research and the limitations of the research are summarized. The author believes CAP is rich in contents and is very complicated, it is not an easy task to explore the general features like the mode of thinking and the mdoe of discourse from the enormous pool of CAP. The process is tough while the result is valuable and significant.