A Study On Stephen Owen’s Readings In Chinese Literature Thought

How to transform the ancient Chinese literary discourse into modernity and how to interpret the traditional Chinese literary discourse to make proper use of the western theoretical resources have always been the focus of Chinese literary circles.American Sinologist Stephen Owen’s Readings in Chinese Literary Thought provides a new attempt.This book breaks the traditional research method of the history of ideas,interprets thoughts through texts,and makes a quite new interpretation of Chinese literary theory from the perspective of comparison between China and the west.Through the study of Stephen Owen’s Readings in Chinese Literary Thought,this paper elaborates on Stephen Owen’s research perspective and methods,and tries to provide some useful references for the construction of Chinese literary theory.This paper mainly discusses the characteristics of Stephen Owen’s interpretation of Chinese literary theory from three aspects:First,hermeneutics of "knowledge".According to Stephen Owen,the differences in the focus of Chinese and western literary thoughts are rooted in the differences in cognitive modes.He learned from Confucius "Look to how it is.Consider from what it comes.Examine in what a person would be at rest." a kind of hermeneutics of "knowing".He argued that there are three stages of knowing a person: how it is;what it comes and what a person would be at rest.This,he says,shows that China’s perception is not that the west seeks the essence of things,but that it knows inside from the outside.That is,to see a person’s external behavior,to go deep into the internal to discuss the reasons for the formation of such a person,in order to "know" the person.On this basis,Stephen Owen interprets the hermeneutics of this "knowledge" contains two hypotheses: the theory of manifestation and the mode of "knowing people".He analyzed a series of important proposition of Chinese literary theory,later all is built around these two assumptions,on the cognitive pattern of traditional Chinese thought he interpreted a outline of the development of a clear "know",which shows the Chinese traditional literary thought on the structure of thinking different from western,highlight theunique value of Chinese literary theory itself.Second,the text form of traditional literary theory.Besides the way of cognition,Stephen Owen found that the text form of Chinese traditional literary theory is also worthy of attention.According to Stephen Owen,the mode of discourse in China,represented by Poetic exposition rhetoric,embodies a mode of discourse of "detailed".It is not a western Aristotelian hierarchy of problems,but an attempt to exhaust an area.Stephen Owen said that this kind of "detailed" explaining implies the supplement and balance of "yi".Just like the operation of hexagrams in yi,when one viewpoint is carried out to the extreme,the author will balance it with another viewpoint to prevent the argument from slipping into the danger of transition.Thus Stephen Owen found a theoretical basis for the traditional literary theory from the inside of Chinese traditional thought.He also points out that the traditional Chinese poetic prose embodies a style of thought,and poetic prose is actually a unique form of text coherent by the author’s subtle and profound thoughts.Third,metaphor and cultural context.In addition to the western and Chinese attention to cognitive mode and textual form,Stephen Owen always regarded text as an opaque thing,and he devoted himself to exploring the hidden thoughts in text.Thus he focuses on the numerous metaphorical modes of Chinese traditional texts and the complex entanglement between texts and cultural contexts.Through the analysis of the characteristics of metaphor and noumenon,he found that in Lu Ji’s creation theory,words actually exist independently of the author,which is different from the early manifestation theory.Besides,Stephen Owen found the unique value of popular poetics,and believed that popular poetics was the epitome of the enlightenment education at that time and an indispensable background material for academic research.Moreover,Stephen Owen pointed out that the Zen thoughts in T’sang-lang’s Remarks on Poetry were only a tool used by Yan Yu to prove the legitimacy of his deviant position,thus giving a new interpretation to T’sang-lang’s Remarks on Poetry...