The Comparative Study Of The Theory Of Zhiyin And Reader-response Criticism

As an important part of Dragon Carving and the Literary Mind, “zhiyin” is the first fairly systematic literary criticism in ancient China. It gave a comprehensive discussion about the literary criticism attitude, characteristics, methods, and the basic principles of literary criticism. Besides, it involved the relationship between literary criticism and creation, literary appreciation and so on. The theory of zhiyin is highly summarized of the reader’s criticism views in “zhiyin”. Reader-response criticism was developed and evolved from reception theory in the United States of American, which paid a great attention to the receptive subject(reader). Different from the past literary criticism research paradigm that centered on the author or the text, it created a new field of contemporary western literary theories.The thesis aims at taking the theory of zhiyin and reader-response criticism as research objects on the basis of previous studies. Using literature research and comparative study to comb and integrate the subject and object, the meaning of text, readers and reading concept in the theory of zhiyin and reader-response criticism, explore the similarities and differences between them. Besides, the deficiencies of the theory of zhiyin and reader-response criticism will be discussed respectively so as to have a further understanding of the reader criticism in the theory of zhiyin and reader-response criticism, to play an active role in the continuous improvement of the construction of Chinese contemporary literary theory.The research achievement mainly covers the following points: i) in the aspect of the subject and object, the relation between the subject and object in the theory of zhiyin is complementary interactive with each other. However, more on the subject dominates and structures the object in reader response-criticism. ii) in the aspect of the meaning of text, both the theory of zhiyin and reader-response criticism emphasize on the readers’ subjective initiative in the realization of the text meaning, while the former is inclined to the author’s writing intention, the latter is more inclined to reader’s reading experience.iii) in the aspect of readers, both the theory of zhiyin and reader-response criticism affirm the important position of reader in the literary criticism but have different views on the positioning of reader. Zhiyin can be a real reader or literary critic who is knowledgeable, but the reader of reader-response criticism must be a “knowledgeable reader”. In addition, for the understanding of the prejudice on readers, they are different too. The former advocates to avoid readers’ misunderstanding, but the latter insists that the existence of all interpretation is worthwhile, which is a part of the reading experience. Therefore, instead of being excluded, it should be permitted to exist. iv) in the aspect of reading concept, the theory of zhiyin advocates “shen shi jian ao”(deep understanding and thought induce elation at heart), while reader-response criticism uses “community interpretation” to interpret the activity of readers. Through the comparison of “six views” of Liu Xie and “literary competence” of Johnson Culler(1991), the author summarized the analyzed similarities and differences between them. Roughly speaking, Culler tries to find some reading conventions from the perspective of linguistics namely from the level of words, sentence, and grammar a set of forms in order to help us read a literary text. However, Liu Xie talks about not only the initial process of creation and reading, but also the methods of reading and the experience of creation and reading by predecessors.