| This is a study of literary theory from the perspective of literary openness and open poetics. While openness is defined in terms of Umberto Eco's idea of unlimited possibilities in interpretation, open poetics refers to how openness is conceived and made. It argues that literary openness is a cross-cultural phenomenon and the impulse for artistic openness in literature has deep roots in the Chinese and Western traditions. As history advanced, it eventually blossomed into a major concern in literary thought, East and West. Ironically, insights of openness generally took the form of blindness in Paul de Man's conception, especially in the Chinese tradition. For over two millennia, China has produced a staggering amount of exegesis filled with insights of openness. These insights, however, are paradoxical in nature. Many theorists, commentators, and exegetes have proclaimed the endless meaning of a text to be a supreme goal for a literary work, but more have insisted that the aim of interpretation is to seek out the original intention of the author. Few have been willing to acknowledge the openness of a text, still less to recognize the profound implications of their theories, commentaries, and exegeses for a conception of openness and open poetics. By examining some selected materials from the Chinese tradition, Yying and Shijing hermeneutics, traditional poetry and poetics, classical and modern commentaries on the Jin Ping Mei, the Hongloumeng, and Lu Xun's stories, this study has, with the aid of contemporary theories on linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis, and representation, managed to tease out enough insights of openness to construct a Chinese open poetics. From a pure theoretical perspective, this study explores these issues: what constitutes openness, how openness is manifested in a particular work, to what extent a conscious use of language and writing strategies may give rise to different degrees of openness, and how significant an open poetics is for the making of verbal art. Although its immediate aim has been to identify elements of openness in the selected materials and to formulate an open poetics in the Chinese tradition, the larger aim is to find new ways of conceptualizing reading and writing and to work towards a cross-cultural open poetics. |
