On The "Critical Review School" Of Literary Thought

As a conservative school of culture in China's modern literature history,Critical Review school has been subjected to cold shouder. In the New Era, Critical Review school gradually have begun to enter our vision. Critical Review school and New Culture school have been an academic debate in two aspect of culture and literature.On culture, for the eastern and western culture,the two group have an argument over the epistemology and the methodology. The Crierion Group considered that the two cultures can be coordination because they are the different cultural systems.Whereas the New Culture shool thought that the easten culture was ancient and laggard and the western culture was modern and advanced, as a result the latter should take the place of the former. On literature,the debate from both sides followed with the line of character and literary. They argued about the relationships between the writings in vernacular and the writings in classical Chinese, Vernacular literature and old chinese literature,free verse written in vernacular and classical poetry. Critical Review school advocated the selection of the appropriate expression according to the different essence of the contents.On the realationship between with vernacular literature and old chinese literature, Critical Review school thought the literature should not be divide into the old and the modern, and they hold the view on absorbing excellent traditional culture.On the poetics, they advocated that the new ideas are expressed by the classical poetic style.Critical Review school hold that deal with the relationship between literature and life harmoniously, the literature is a expression of life,and this idea was used to guide the literature writing and the cultivation of the spirit of writers.Further more, they constructed the criterion of Ethical Criticism,and discussed the issues of the critics'duties. All these enriched the construction of the new literary theory. Faced with the relationship between tradition and modern, Critical Review school protested the dualistic theory and emphasized the dialogue and synthesis.Based on this cognition, their ideas—such as about the cultural transplant,—still have meaning to us today when we will try to think the relationships between the tradition and modern, the internal conversion and external reconstruction of the literary theory.