Qian Zhongshu And The New Criticism

Qian Zhongshu is a prominent Chinese scholar. The New Criticism isan outstanding western literary criticism school. Both of them have agreat influence upon the academic thoughts of world. In his study onhistory classics, Qian zhongshu absorbed much western scientificknowledge which Chinese traditional culture is lack of, and at the sametime he ingeniously infused his feeling into his academic study so that heestablished a complete knowledge system which not only was involved inmany different fields including arts, religion and science but alsointegrated the essence of western thoughts and Chinese thoughts. Hispoint of view can be generalized as the foreword of Discusses skillRecord shows, "Since the western and the eastern share the commonpsychology, the world academic thoughts have the same roots." So Qianzhongshu devoted his life into discovering and refining the essence ofwestern and eastern cultures in order to make a profound communicationand understanding between the western and the eastern.The New Criticism emphasizes detailed analysis on works so itstheory has pragmatic functions as a useful tool for literary criticism. Itstheory only makes a detailed analysis on the inner elements of works andexcludes all outer elements such as the social and historical factors, thefactors of the author, the reactions of the reader, the common features ofgenre and so on. So New Criticism made a hot hit in the western literarycircle and enjoyed a high popularity in 20th century.It is no doubt that there are some similarities between Qian Zhongshuand The New Criticism. So this article tries to make a study on QianZhongshu's acceptance of New Criticism from the prospective of hispoint of view which, in his words, is to get through the western and eastern cultures. Through analyzing several key words like "intentionalfallacy", "feeling fallacy", "the irony", "the metaphor", "the ambiguity"and through comparing these key words with Qian zhongshu's academicthoughts, this article tries to discover how New Criticism infused intoQian zhougshu's academic thoughts. Namely, how Qian zhongshuaccepted, assimilated and integrated the theories of The New Criticism.This article is divided into five parts mainly including QianZhongshu's point of view of getting through the eastern and westerncultures, the comparison of Qian zhongshu's academic thoughts withNew Criticism's theories as the above-mentioned key words shows.Through seeking for the theories of New Criticism displaying in Qianzhongshu's academic thoughts, this article tries not only to generalize thesimilarities and differences between Qian Zhongshu and New Criticismin order to understand their academic thoughts more deeply, but also tofind a good way for the communication of eastern and western cultures.