Guo Shaoyu's Research On Chinese Poetic Criticism

Guo Shao-yu, as one of the founders of the Chinese literary criticism history, established his historical status and won the positive public opinion with his outstanding academic achievements.Instead of purely positioning his achievements with reference to the construction of the discipline of the history of literary criticism, the dissertation attempts to locate them within the general framework of the development of Chinese literary criticism, and reexamine "Guo Shao-yu's Experience" from a reflectively academic, literary, and cultural perspective within a global context, with the intention to dig out some valuable theoretical aspirations and value orientations which will play a constructive role in formulating literary theories with Chinese characteristics.Adopting literary hermeneutics and cultural poetics as the main methodologies and post-colonial critical theory as the auxiliary one, this dissertation treats Guo's academic system and his academic ideal of formulating Marxist literary and artistic theories with Chinese characteristics as an organic whole, sorting out meticulously his epistemic configurations and theoretical paradigms of Chinese poetic criticism, and his views on literary criticism by means of combining a historical unraveling and phenomenal analysis. By analyzing his personality traits and the impact of New Culture Movement and modern western aesthetics on him, this study attempts to illuminate empirically the originating contexts within which the modernity of Guo's Chinese poetic criticism emerged, and reflect on the possible causes for its contradictions and limitations from a cultural and academic perspective as well as the perspective of personal psychology, and its constructive value for Chinese literary theory.This dissertation asserts that Guo constructed a complete academic system with the history of Chinese literary criticism as its core research field and the categorical criticism of Chinese poetics, the study of Chinese poetics, the linguistic and stylistic criticism of Chinese poetics as its epistemic dimensions. He created a question-based research paradigm, a hermeneutic paradigm featuring historical reduction and an interpretive paradigm for cultural poetics. Adhering to the moral integrity of an intellectual who was sometimes unbridled, Guo lived out actively the scientific spirit of The May Fourth Movement and the spirit of the movement of "rearranging the national heritage", and consciously accepted Marxism and modern western aesthetics and fused them. On the one hand, Guo's Chinese poetic criticism displayed distinctive modernity; on the other hand, it led to inevitable academic contradictions and dilemma.Guo's academic ideal was to formulate Marxist literary and artistic theories with Chinese characteristics, which failed to be realized at last due to the irresolvable contradictions between the ever changing social contexts and his personality and academic stand. This is not only the personal dilemma and regrets of Guo's own, but those of Guo's generation. Up to this day, the formulation of Marxist literary and artistic theory has been a task unfinished for the Chinese literary theory circles. Guo Shao-yu pointed out a direction for us. We can return to Guo Shao Yu to gain further access to some of the knowledge resources, intellectual resources so as to explore possible route to build a discourse system of Chinese literature theory.