A Study On The Activity Of Evaluation Of Characters And Literary Criticism In The Six Dynasties

This thesis comments on how the activity of Evaluation of Characters affected the literary criticism during Six Dynasties Period.It falls into four chapters:firstly,to track the evolution of Evaluation of Characters in this period and the development of Self-consciousness in the process;secondly,to study the highlight of literature writing ability in Evaluation of Characters;thirdly,to have a research on how Evaluation of Characters influenced the form,the way of thinking and the main content of literary criticism,as well as the formation and the use of "humanized" terminology of literary criticismAs a social activity,Evaluation of Characters ran through the Six Dynasties,but in different period,the focuses of it were different.In general,in the late Han Dynasty,Evaluation of Characters attached great importance to Confucian ethics,but when it came to early Wei Dynasty,ability in the political and military aspects received certain attention.And after Zhengshi period,literature and art talent,the feelings of people,elegant demeanor and the appearance attained full attention.The change of focus in Evaluation of Characters marked that the activity gradually shifted from a way to select talented person for national political domination into an aesthetic cultural activity.What's more,Self-consciousness also developed in some degree.In aesthetic Evaluation of Characters,the talents,the feelings,the demeanor and the appearance were placed in important position,and among various talents,people paid more attention to literary talent.Why did literary talent receive more attention?It could be attributed to the re-understanding of the status and value of literature and the prevalence of the policy to select talented person by examining their literary attainments.There was no doubt that aesthetic Evaluation of Characters made people pay more attention to literary talent,what was more important was that literature was gradually incorporated into the activity of Evaluation of Characters.With the improvement of the ability to appreciate the beauty of people and things,as well as the consciousness of aesthetic sense,the activity of Evaluation of Characters had a trend to expand.We can find that in addition to the character,nature and art were also important object in Evaluation of Characters.In the process of appreciating characters,the beauties of nature and various forms of art,people fully understood that different objects were interlinked in the essence of beauty.Based on that point,when people appreciating one of the object,they could use the others to explain.Now that art were included in the range of Evaluation of Characters,and literature was an important form of art,so the appearance of extemporaneous comment about literature was natural,which was a manifestation of conscious development of literature in the Six Dynasties.There was no doubt that Evaluation of Characters had effect on literary criticism,and we could find enough evidence.Firstly,Evaluation of Characters affected the overall appearance of literary criticism in the Six Dynasties.As far as the way of criticism was concerned,the way of commenting characters was borrowed by literary criticism,and thus forming a certain paradigm of literary criticism,which combined grading with artistic comment.As to the way of thinking,Evaluation of Characters tended to use analogues and imagery in order to visually describe characters.What was similar to Evaluation of Characters,in literary criticism,analogues and imagery were also used to hone the views to sound bites and images.In addition,consistent with the tendency of Evaluation of Characters,the focus of literary criticism in the Six Dynasties period was beyond the function of moral education,but was close to the literary ontology knowledge.Secondly,"humanized criticism" was the tendency of criticism in the Six Dynasties,and it was also associated with Evaluation of Characters.In this period,not only the structure of the human body,the human activities were used in literary criticism as analogy of symbolize stylistic structure and literary phenomenon,but also the temperament and characteristics of character were fully mined in order to find aesthetic category which was applicable in literary criticism Obviously,the subjectivity of characters was fully mined in Evaluation of Characters,especially the talents,the feelings,the demeanor and the appearance,which had extremely rich aesthetics implication.All those had great importance for the development of"humanized criticism".At the same time,some aesthetic categories which were developed in Evaluation of Characters,were transplanted and extended by literary criticism,thus forming a good number of humanized literary critical terms.Finally,some literature theory concerning writers,works and stylistics dovetailed with the theory of Evaluation of Characters in the Six Dynasties.As far as the theories involving writers and works were concerned,making comment on writers and works and having judge of characters was the same in essence.Meanwhile,they both tended to make comparison,and then characters and writers were separated into classes.In addition,the theory about relationship between character and talent in Evaluation of Characters had influence on Cai-Lue critique in literary criticism.As to stylistics,there was a close relationship between the rise of Stylistic Analysis and the theory of selecting talented person in the Six Dynasties,which laid emphasis on the match of responsibility,ability and position,What's more,when writing various styles of articles,different writers were partial to different types.It was similar to certain theory about Evaluation of Characters,which considered that ability varied among different people.The thesis is focus on the relationship between the activity of Evaluation of Characters and literature criticism,but it doesn't mean that only the activity of Evaluation of Characters has impact on literature criticism.Literary criticism in the Six Dynasties period carries rich cultural information,and Evaluation of Characters is only a facial.This paper aims at studying the relationship between the Evaluation of Characters and contemporary literary theory,in order to illustrate that Chinese ancient literary criticism is rooted in the profound cultural background and it contains rich cultural connotation.