| For a long time,the academics have tend to focus on Lukacs’ s youth,while Lukacs’ s early years were equally important stages of intellectual development.The Theory of the Novel,Lukacs’ s last book before he turned to Marxism,is important for examining the internal unity of Lukacs’ s thought before and after the Marxist turn.Influenced by neo-Kantianism and the philosophy of life,Lukacs develops his exploration of issues such as value and experience according form.He sees form as a schema for the expression of experience,the supreme judge of life.With the outbreak of World War I,the decline of ethical and moral concepts under the impact of rationalism,In the face of these problems,Kant uses the term ’self-existent things’ to point to the severance of the subject from the object.Lukacs drew on Hegel to develop his ideas of totality.The Theory of the Novel is the embodiment of Lukacs’ s demand for totality,and he believes that the novel,as a representative literary form of modern society,has the function of criticising alienation and ethical redemption.Lukacs delineated three types of novel.The abstract idealism,which actively acts outwardly but lacks inner experience,achieves freedom for the subject through irony;the romanticism of disillusionment,which emphasizes lyricism,easily leads to the collapse of form and solipsism,and forms a historical unity through the extension of time;the educational novel,which seeks to reconcile the individual with social reality but ultimately fails.And the Tolstoyan novel,which holds the promise of transcending the forms of social life.As his knowledge of the novel deepened,Lukács came to realise the limitations of the novel form,and Dostoevsky prompted Lukács to realise the need for revolution,and Lukacs turned to Marxism,valuing the proletariat as the subject of revolution.It is worth noting that Lukacs’ thought was influenced by the tradition of Hegelianism.This led him to confine dialectics to the realm of history,with insufficient knowledge of the dialectics of nature and the practice of production,among others.In his later years Lukacs worked on the construction of a Marxist aesthetics,and he elaborated on the anti-fetishistic function of art in terms of reflection theory.Based on this,we can see that Lukacs’ thought has an inner unity and his concept of novel form has a unique value,which can provide a reference for the academic community to grasp the background and connotation of Lukacs’ thought as a whole. |
