Symptomatic Reading And Literary Criticism

As a new critical method, symptomatic reading plays an important role in modern western social science, humanity academics and the left politics. This thesis is not intended to give an exhaustive description of symptomatic reading, but just study symptomatic reading in literary criticism. Symptomatic reading has been exerting a great influence on the philosophical basis and aesthetic taste of modern western literary criticism. Therefore, from symptomatic reading we may get a deeper understanding of contemporary western literary criticism since structuralism. Throughout the study we may construct Chinese literary criticism more consciously.My dissertation is constituted by there parts—introduction, main part and conclusion. In the introduction, I will introduce the historical background and the cultural context in which symptomatic reading was brought up, especially the complicated relation between its times and this creative thought.The main part can be devided into four chapters. In order to explore the development of symptomatic reading, in chapter one I will introduce its trace from psychoanalysis to western Marxist literary criticism. In the development of the theory, Sigmund freud, Jacques lacan, Louis althusser and Pierre macherey produced a lot of vital views. The second chapter will reveal the main theoretical points of symptomatic reading in literary criticism. Its include "the original sin of reading", "the implied text" and "the production of criticism" . The third chapter is the core of my thesis. In this part, I try to find out how to use this symptomatic reading to analysis texts. This chapter can be devided into three parts: faceing the text, finding the symptomatic,doudle reading.The aim of the forth chapter is to illustrate the great importance of symptomatic reading to literary criticism. First, it opened the horizon of contemporary western literary criticism;second, it renewed the views to the function and the property of literary criticism;third, It strengthen the critics of the literary criticism;forth, it changed our traditional views on the relations of arts and reality. In the last part, it is proposed that there are still some problems haven't been solved.