| Cultural criticism in the 1990s?is a distinctive critical approach closely attached to social and cultural context. It springs up owing to the multiplicity of Chinese culture and the influence of western cultural studies, trying to observe literature with a cultural perspective. With the continuous development of cultural criticism, it manifests its characteristics as the following: Firstly, it anatomizes literary texts from multiple perspectives, either internal or external. Secondly, the openness embodied in critical approaches, critical horizon, value orientation and critical psychology forms an open air of cultural criticism. Thirdly, cultural criticism becomes a criticism of participation ascribing to critics?strong recognition of participation. In the 1990s? there are three discourses inside the discourse field of cultural criticism, i.e., master discourse, mass discourse and essence discourse. Relationships among the three are quite complicated because they follow different rules respectively. Conflicts and mergence coexist, yet mergence gradually excels to be a new tendency. Because of the characteristics of cultural criticism and the complexity inside its discourse field, some critics raise a question: whether or not cultural criticism belongs to literary criticism. In the system of literary criticism, the identity of cultural criticism as a school of literary criticism is challenged. Therefore a theoretical study on this point is done in the thesis. The author tries to expound that a literary text is both literary and cultural. The primary aim of cultural criticism is to find out the cultural meanings of a text, conveying its cultural properties. This tendency is a very correction of the past criticism that over-emphasized on æ‡iterariness? Meanwhile, it does not aim to hinder the existence and development of other critical approaches. Consequently, cultural criticism is still a school of literary criticism. |
