Metacriticism

The paradigm of western humanities and social science have changed greatly since the 1960s, and discipline reconsidering has been the universal characteristic in many subjects. Many things undoubtedly have to be reconsidered and they have to defend their existence and forms, such as the reliability of objects, the necessity of study, the validity of the researcher's situation as well as the reasonableness of study technique and method.On this academic background, all kinds of metatheory arose at this historic moment with no exception of literature and arts. This article mainly carries on the discussion to metacriticism.Metacriticism, in other words, the criticism to criticism, is the second-order relation to critical objects. Rene Wellek divided the literary studies into interior research and exterior research, and his classification has important methodology significance on literature studies. Metacriticism also studies literary criticism on these two aspects. Having literary criticism as its subject, on the one hand, Metacriticism discusses the interior mechanism of criticism such as its quality, function, procedure, integrant parts and movement rules and so on, generalizes the lowest limited quantity glossary to a discipline, traces and inspects the statement logic and "analyzes the password and the pattern which we make when these statements are engaged in the work as well as in application". On the other hand, metacriticism carries on the inspection on the exterior factor of literary criticism, reconsiders itself on study method and the validity of critical context, discloses the institution of object and the limitation of the conclusion on knowledge. The literary criticism precisely exposes its original shape in the unceasing exploration of the two aspects, and the union between the two dynamic factors presents the unique disciplinal characteristic of literary criticism, thus metacriticism shows the metalanguage orientation, the metacommentary orientation and the disciplinal scientific orientation. The prosperity of metacriticism started with the change of paradigm of the humanities and social science, and it was influenced by phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, analytic philosophy and the post-structraalism and so on. These counter-essentialism philosophy and thinkers are all against the former essentialism with all kinds of theories. These thoughts provide resources for metacriticism such as Edmund Husserl's idea of go back to things themselves", Martin Heidegger's "desein", Gadamer's historic idea of objects and subjects, Bertrand Russell's"the external relation"and Ludwig Wittgenstein's"the meaning is usage". Furthermore, the post-constructuralists participated personally in the literary criticism practice in "The Linguistic Turn".The author takes critics and texts as the two basic essential factors of criticism. According to the complex relationship of the two factors, we can get four kinds of basic types of criticism: the type of demonstrating form, the type of constituting union, the type of self-expressing and the type of denying irony. Each kind of literary criticism can be taken in one of them or their changing forms.