The Rise And The Fall Of The Literature Criticism Revolution

With the development of New Period Literature after the Cultural Revolution, literary criticism also began its own transform. Since the New Enlightenment in 1984, a large number of humanities achievements in western culture started to be introduced into China, which updated the criticism methods and the criticism ideology of the critics. Under this circumstance, the New Trendy Criticism took the stage of history at the right moment.With respect to the concept, the New Trendy Criticism is a new criticism method which pays attention to the internal composition, such as forms and techniques, and the aesthetic values of the literature from the very nature of the literature. In this period, a large number of young critics, represented by Wu Liang, Huang Ziping, Li Jie, Ji Hongzhen, Cheng Depei, Nan Fan, Cai Xiang, became to the sponsors and impellors. They are called the New Trendy Critics. These people started to break the existing methodologies on literature like the Marxism Criticism, the Reflection Theory Criticism, and the Society-History Criticism, and instead focused on the ontology of literature, namely the narrative patterns, languages and structures. And they focused on the literary ontology content, namely the narrative patterns, language, structures. During the process, they tried to systematize and formalize their proposition as much as possible, in order to further to construct their own unique model of criticism.The New Trendy Criticism gradually came to the end with the change of social environment, but its own inherent limitations are, in fact, the major reason that blocked its in-depth development. The internal limitations broadly fall into two categories -- the knowledge limitations, which are reflected by its heavy dependency on western theory and deficiency in innovation, and the thought limitations, which are manifested by the weakness of group consciousness and the obscureness of narration. In particular, the knowledge limitation manifested more dependence on western theory and innovation deficiency. And the thought limitation is instantiated by the weak group consciousness and the obscure narration of critics. Although the New Trendy Criticism has a variety of problems, its contributions are still unprecedented: First, it powerfully fostered transformation of literature history; secondly, it brought great changes of literature criticism in the new era.