As To The Meaning And Implication Of Literary Significance

Western literary critiques always accentuate on the research of literary meaning. Traditional western articles take literary text as the result of the author's writing action, and text is either the reflection of the author's ideas and feelings or the reflection of the outside world of life. Because of that, the research for literary meaning is also the retracing for the author's original ideas or the understanding of the life connotation that the text presents. The attribute theory of literary meaning is based on that. After the swerving of linguistics, modern literary critiques shows two tendency: the first one take literary meaning as a product of language structure or language distinction from text inside; the other connects the text with outside elements of readers, society and author together, and insists that literary meaning is not the attribute fixed inside of the text, but a process of reacting with other elements. The literary meaning of relationship theory is based on that. Literary meaning has mainly three characters in terms of historical changing, from stationary to motive, from unified to disordered, from ideas to language. Radically speaking, that is the due result of the changing of literary critique's researching objects, from author to text, then from text to reader.This article integrates the historical research of literary meaning, refers to Eric Donald Hirsch's differentiation between "significance "and "sense", Wolfgang Iser's differentiation between "text" and "production", and advances the idea that, literary meaning is the unification of text significance and production sense, the two are indispensable factors of literary meaning, significance relates with text, it is an inner attribute of text; while sense always connects with elements of author, reader, world and other texts, it is a kind of relationship. That is to say, significance is the product of text system, but sense is the product of relations. Sense is not the complete product of reader's subjectivity; it also must be based on text significance. Text significance is restrained by the semantic principles and language system, and is also the product of author's subjective logical thinking, and that case gives it some integrity as well as stability, and the text significance of different ages are stable. Significance is stationary and a latent form of sense. Sense is dynamic, the outside form of significance, and the realization of significance. The translation from significance to sense or the realization of sense is dependent on the appearance of reader. The text significance is a hierarchical system; it includes the following three aspects: language meaning, image meaning, and connotation. The reception in terms of literary meaning mainly has two layers: understanding and explanation, articulation and critique. Understanding and explanation is the opening out of text significance, articulation and critique is the opening out of production sense.Text significance and production sense are the two aspects of one thing, and both are indispensable. Text significance is the center of literary meaning; it restricts the appearance of literary meaning through some kind of logical integrity and oneness. Production sense can neither be the limitless spreading of culture, nor the endless game of language symbols, text significance make all these things confined in a certain extent. Text significance actually takes literary meaning as the inside attribute of text, while production sense take literary meaning as relations among text significance and text, text and author, text and reader, text and world. In this case, that gives literary meaning a certain degree of opening as well as flexibility, and put literary meaning inside of certain extent, thus promises the probability of objective understanding of literary meaning.