The Concept Of Evaluation And The Construction Of Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory

The introduction of axiology into China started the research of evaluation theory, which has been ignored after a short period of development from the end of I 980s to the mid-I 990s.And the research of the evaluation theory during that time was confined to sociology and philosophy, with literary research domain left untouched .There are two reasons for this: firstly, in the research hierarchy of philosophy, the evaluation theory has never been studied in its own right because it has been treated either as a sub-area of the theory of knowledge or that of axiology. Secondly, in the domain of literary theoretical research, the literary evaluation has been either equated as literary appreciation or confused with literary criticism, thus it has been limited to literary criticism, which has made the research of literary evaluation unnecessary. Right now, there are two tasks for us to do. The first task is to distinguish the two pairs of concepts, i. e, evaluation and knowledge, and evaluation and value, in order to make evaluation research an independent area. Both evaluation and knowledge are ideological activities of mankind, which are interrelated, but not the same. While evaluation is multi-faceted, which is strongly influenced by people's value system and emotions; knowledge is true, objective and scientific. And evaluation does not belong to axiology because evaluation is an ideological activity while the existence of value is independent of man s consciousness. Furthermore, they are very different from each other in their boundaries of existence and in the subject-object relationship. The second task is to differentiate literary evaluation from literary criticism and literary theory. Literary evaluation is a component of literary criticism, yet the latter cannot cover the former completely because literary evaluation has its own subject-matter and research domain. Literary evaluation is a emotional judgernent and expression of the value phenomenon in the literary activities. Because literary evaluation is a special phenomenon, it not only exist in the literary accepting activities, but also in the whole literary activities. As.. the theoretical summary of literary phenomenon, literary theory should regard literary evaluation as one of the important objects of study. Moreover, it must pay attention to its evaluating nature based on knowledge. Literary evaluation is not only a method, but a new concept which guides the construction of contemporary literary. For this reason, the research of literary evaluation is not only necessary but also important and meaningful for the construction of contemporary Chinese literary theory.