On Wellek's Literary Criticism And Contemporary Value

Rene Weller is one of the most outstanding theory critic in the 20 th century western and have put forward the viewpoints in the field of literary theory and criticism theory.He is famous for the remarkable achievement in the world.This paper aims at a systematic discussion of wellek's literary criticism theory,including the following four parts.The first chapter of this paper overall grasps the historical background of wellek and traces the theoretical source of wellek's literary criticism.The 20 th century is an era of criticism and transformation.Under the impact of humanism and scientism,western philosophy criticized the metaphysics of traditional philosophy,which provides guidance and enlightenment for the development direction and methodology of literary criticism in the 20 th century.In terms of literary creation,as the mainstream of literature in the 20 th century,modernism literature is famous for its opposition to traditional creation methods and forms of expression.Many literary criticism theories closely related to literary creation are also anti-traditional with frequent replacement and sublation to each other.The second chapter explores wellek's view of literary criticism.Wellek defined the concept of "literary criticism" in a narrow sense and a broad sense respectively,and established its important position in literary research.In Wellek's view,the relationship between literary theory,literary criticism and literary history is dialectical,interpenetrating and interactive.Then wellek criticized relativism and absolutism.He pointed out that relativism would lead to the confusion of the value standard of criticism,while the standard of criticism of absolutism is dogmatic.In terms of criticism methods,wellek also complained about impressionism and positivism.The standard of impressionism criticism is subjective and random,which will cause confusion of value standard.Positivist criticism focuses on non-literary factors such as the author's social background,personal interpersonal relationship,cultural level,mental state,and psychological characteristics,without paying attention to literary works themselves.The third chapter discusses wellek's standard literary criticism.The correct way of criticism proposed by wellek is dialectical "perspectivism".This approach regards literary works as a whole,and requires criticism to adhere to standards and values.It has the value scale of eternal and dynamic development,and examines literary works from the three dimensions of structure,symbol and value.Wellek thought that the noumenon of literary works is a "multi-level symbolic structure",and the value of literature exists in this structure and is closely related to it.Therefore,the level of literary value is the standard of literary criticism.From the perspective of aesthetics,wellek holds that literary value lies in aesthetic value.The fourth chapter analyzes current situation in the field of literary criticism in China and points out the significance of wellek's critical theory and method.First of all,in theory,wellek emphasizes the importance of value judgment to literary criticism,and clearly points out that taking aesthetics as the criterion of criticism is helpful to regain value judgment and rebuild value for domestic literary criticism;In terms of criticism methods,it unifies the essence and value of literature and measures the quality of works by aesthetic standards.aims to return criticism to the track of literariness and artistry of the works.It is helpful to return criticism to the track of literariness and artistry of works.In addition,it has guiding significance and enlightening to remold the consciousness of criticism and standard so as to judge the quality of works objectively and accurately.