The Conflict Between Aesthetics And Cultural Politics

Since the debate on literary canon happened in American,two opposing research paradigms have been formed:aesthetic criticism and cultural political criticism.Supporters of both views have discussed heatedly,which has made great progress in the field of literary studies.At present,these two kinds of academic discourses have become closed academic production with self-circulation.In my view,retrospecting the canon debate will contribute to the further development of literary theory.So I selected one representative theorist from each side,through the specific comparative analysis,back to the history of canon debate,grasping the essence of the classic arguments,applying the conclusion to the rewriting of literary history in domestic.This article selected two theorists who had a real conversation in the canon debate:Harold Bloom and Edward W.Said,analyzing their views of literary canon.In the first chapter,through careful study,the author expounded the differences of their opinions on literary canon in three aspects:essence,criticism and reading.In the second chapter,the author pointed out the differences in their literary tastes and explained that its underlying reason is the difference between elitist literary view and democratic literary view.Through the analysis of their representative criticism:Bloom's Shakespeare criticism and Said's Jane Austen criticism,this article discussed their different focuses in the classical interpretation.The third chapter discussed the different causes of their views of literary canon from two aspects:growth experience and academic origin.Firstly,the author applied Bourdieu's habitus theory,pointing out that Bloom's love of literature originated from his reading experience in the childhood,while Said's democratic criticism started from the alien feelings due to his dual identity.After that,this article sorted out their academic origin.The fourth chapter pointed out that the essence of their arguments on the view of literary canon is the conflict between aesthetics and cultural politics and applied this conclusion to the interpretation of the replacement of the paradigm in Chinese literary theory.Then the author descripted the historical change and interpreted specific texts in order to illustrate the canon debate in domestic.Finally,this paper came to a conclusion that aesthetics criticism and cultural politics criticism are two dimensions of classical interpretation,both of which have certain rationality and illustrating effectiveness.The question of which of them will become the mainstream of The Times depends on the historical context.What literary researchers need to do is to treat classics with a rigorous and sensitive approach2and treat different paradigms of literary research with an open and inclusive mind.