The Highlight Of Aesthetic Experience

The basis of annotations of fictions of the Ming and Qing dynasties is the text reading of the annotators, one of whose aims is to guide other readers in their readings; therefore, this dissertation on those annotations takes the aesthetic experience of reading as the centre, and regards enquiries of this kind of aesthetic experience as the most important and valuable achievement of those annotations. In the process of reading, the annotators paid close attention on the aesthetic experiences of readers, analyzing, on the one hand, the generative mechanism of aesthetic experiences from the perspective of readers, and probing, on the other hand, into the interactive relationship between text and the aesthetic experiences of readers; as a result, they built a kind of theory about art of fiction. Thus, an important theoretical significance can be attached to this study on aesthetic experience of reading in those annotations.In the view of this dissertation, the flourishing of annotations of fictions of the Ming and Qing dynasties marked the autonomy of fiction reading. Being different from traditional reading about classics and histories, fiction reading is very much entertaining, and can be categorized as a kind of aesthetic activity in nature. In the process of reading, annotators proposed both a scrutinization, which requires the diversification of reading methods and the unfolding of reading process with sharp consciousness of text, and an analysis of the psychological mechanism of reader’s aesthetic experience, which praises the positivity of readers.The emphasis of Annotations on "the pleasure" of reading is closely related to the social and cultural context of that time. The complexity of political environment, the rising of mind-philosophy, and contagion of civil entertainment culture, all those led to an atmosphere of seeking for pleasures. In this background. although popular fictions were published and widely spread, whose readers covered all classes, whose earnest purpose of reading is to seek for pleasures in reading, these fictions, squarely due to their quality of "being entertaining", stayed at the bottom of cultural authority. However, the theoretical contributions of annotations lie exactly in that they affirmed the entertaining property of fiction, and made a deepgoing and careful analyses of the generative mechanism of this property to justify those fictions ontologically, and that, at the value level, they showed that good fiction could teach through entertainment so as to play a positive and effectual role in social practices.Since Annotators thought that fiction reading was a kind of aesthetic activity, the readers as aesthetic subject must have some relevant qualities, which made them ideal readers. An ideal reader should get absorbed into the text to experience it, excavate the deep implication through the surface of text, and realize, at last, the effective reading methods with the help if annotations. This dissertation lays out a careful discrimination of differences of aesthetic experiences in different times and spaces, and points out the interactions between circumstances, manners of reading and reader’s aesthetic experiences. Thus we can see that, by such elements as narrative techniques, characters, and language, text of fictions could mobilize positively reader’s aesthetic experiences, so that, an important standard to measure the success of the arts of fictions lies at that weather they could trigger effectively the readers feeling pleasures of reading. In fact, just at focusing on those interactions, annotations concluded out all aesthetic principles of narrative construction, rhythm, and perspective, and the theories about character-shaping and languages of fictions, hereby, they accomplished the theoretical system of fictions.Though affirming reader’s seeking for pleasures, the annotations carefully gave those pleasures some conduction and restraining, so that the final theoretical appeal of annotations is to transcend the aesthetic experience. In the process of reading, the transcending appears as rational participation, i.e. to start the fiction readings from sensible appropriating, and to end it in rational cognition. While, notably, the latter must permeate into sentiments, so it can help reader to cultivate polite taste and sensitive judgment. From the view of social function, annotations explored the relationships between the beautiful and the morality and ideology, regarding, accordingly, the morality as the important standard of reader’s taste; they explored especially the relationship between the beautiful and ideology, putting up the reciprocal constriction between "morality" and "art", which represented the complexity of political criticism. Annotations stressed the aesthetic experience of reading and social significance of literature simultaneously, which reflects not only the sensitive judgment of annotators but also their moral sense of responsibility as public intellectuals. Today, when literature criticisms succeed in the heritages of those annotations, they should learn their spirits, instead of their appearances; that is to say, we should put the aesthetic experience as the basic point and call for the beautiful of criticism, on the basis of which to recover their interaction with popular readers and let criticism play its positive role in cultural practices.