Literary Studies in Reconstruction An Introduction to a 在重建一个介绍文学研究.doc

Literary Criticism in Reconstruction: An Introduction to a Contemporary Study of Literature Summary The present volume joins the efforts of those that – swimming against the mainstreams of passe-partout Theory and cultural studies – still wish to preserve the field of literary studies, although not in its established form, but through a fundamental reconstruction comprising both its “internal” conceptual or methodological rearrangement and “external” adjustment to postmodern social, political, and economic realities. My aims are: first, an attempt at conceptual reconstruction that takes into account recent deconstructions of literary criticism’s key notions and critically embraces them in a revised set of hypotheses, not forgetting the constructedness of all knowledge (including that of literature); and, second, to seek contemporary meanings, relevance, and functions of knowledge about literature. Both aims imply a redistribution of scholarly topics, methods, and competences that literary criticism has to deal with if it wishes to survive in the present context of disciplinary redivisions and cross-disciplinary methods (in linguistics, the social sciences, cultural history, psychology, cognitive science, etc.). Only by coming to terms with the global reconstruction of knowledge as well as with relocation of scholarly competences can literary criticism still claim greater general validity and broader social relevance for its insights. This book, which could be entitled “Site under Construction,” is an introduction to these problems and is divided into two parts. In the first part, I comment on the prospects of two main branches of literary criticism: literary theory and literary history. In the second part, I try to reconstruct and revise some basic critical concepts that are used for modeling literary texts and their temporal or spatial contexts. 1. Literary theory. In post-modernity, literary theory has become pluralistic, perspectivized, and – in parallel with the