The Value Research Of The Prescribed-form Text

Prescribed-form text is a type of literary style prescribed for the imperial civil service examinations in Ming and Qing Dynasties. As a literary form, prescribed-form text has a double attribute: on the one hand, as a succession to and development of the style of the former dynasties, it has the characters of a style itself; on the other hand, as a literary form designed for the imperial civil service examinations, and strongly influenced by the contemporary social ideology (Confucianism), it also represents the requirement to establish the standardized examination process.This double attribute makes the prescribed-form text quite different from other styles both in form and in content. It shoulders the responsibility of choosing social elites as officials during the five hundred years of Ming and Qing Dynasties, and receives praises and condemns simultaneously which hardly happens to other literary styles. Its scholasticism in content and its formularization in form is a double-edge sword, representing the requirement for a standardized examination of the contemporary, but encasing the opinions of the students, and further influencing the whole social atmosphere as well. Therefore, choosing imperial officials by the competition in prescribed-form text examinations is undoubtedly a cultural paradox: ineffaceably erroneous but irreplaceable. This cultural paradox emerges due to the multiplicity and complicatedness of social elements involved in the process of the imperial civil service examinations. All theories, criteria, and rules designed by human beings are not omnipotent, valid everywhere, and infallible everlastingly; however, the cultural practice of human beings requires a certain rule, and regulations to some extent. As a result, cultural paradoxes are sure to arise. Prescribed-form text and the correspondent prescribed-form text education during the Ming and Qing times thus unfailingly fall into this awkward predicament.Viewing it as a cultural paradox, this paper, on the basis of an exploration of the evaluation toward the prescribed-form text system in the Ming, Qing Dynasties and its lingering years followed, aims at a close reexamination and a thorough analysis of the value of prescribed-form text. This paper pays attention to the significance of the prescribed-form text as a standardized examination as well as the faults arising from the over-standardization, and thus avoids simple judgment of right or wrong. In the exploration of the studies of the predecessors, this paper refuses to simply label a certain person's opinions toward prescribed-form text as supportive or negative, but restores his or her main ideas to the specified text, so as to avoid distorting the original meaning, and to refine and classify his or her ideas as precise as possible. By thus doing, the studies toward the value of prescribed-form texts will be presented in a multi-layer and three-dimensional structure instead of a linear or plane one.