| Generic criticism is an important part of Fredric Jameson’s dialectical criticism theory.In Jameson’s view,Genre is a bridge connecting the form of works with the social and historical context,and an intermediary mechanism for the dialectical unity of form and content and the historical transformation,so it has important strategic significance for Marxist criticism.Jameson’s concept of "genre" has three different meanings: one is the genre as a system;Second,as a form of text;The third is the genres as a sub-system.Jameson’s generic criticism has two dimensions and three aspects.One dimension is genre-historical criticism and the other is genre-political criticism.The genre-political criticism contains two aspects,one is the ideology analysis of generic form in the text;the other is the analysis of the utopian potential of sub-genres in popular culture.In the aspect of genre-historical criticism,Jameson believes that modern literature began with the disintegration of the pre-modern genre system,and its development process is manifested in the different solutions to the formal problems left by the decline of the genre system.The development of modern culture is a process of strategically appropriating the remnants of genre forms.Therefore,the evolution of modern cultural logic is also manifested in the transformation of genre forms,that is,from the realistic fracture of literary types,to the binary opposition between the anti-literary types and the materialization of literary types in modernism,and then to the collage of literary types in postmodernism.The transformation of genre forms represents the deepening of the reification of modern culture,and it is also accompanied by the opportunity of a new collective cultural production mode.In the ideological analysis of literary forms,Jameson creatively proposed the concept of "ideologeme",which is used to describe the ideological influence of literary forms containing social symbolic information when they are occupied and changed in very different social and cultural contexts.Through case analysis,it can be seen that in Jameson’s theoretical vision,the genre-discontinuity in modern literature is the product of the transformation of thepolitical dilemma contained in the works and its unconscious solutions into the form of aesthetic perception.In the analysis of popular culture’s sub-genres system,Jameson points out that the sub-genres system of popular culture is not only the product of the operation of consumer capital,but also contains the germination of new collectivism.The sub-genres system enables the public to release social anxiety with the help of the old ideological imagination and unconsciously explore the logical possibility of solving the real contradictions,so it has the potential utopian function.Jameson’s generic criticism fully absorbs the achievements of prototype criticism,psychoanalysis criticism,formalism and structuralism,and enriches the theoretical tools of Marxist criticism.At the same time,this mode of criticism contains the chronic disease of Hegelian Marxism that emphasizes logical deduction rather than empirical analysis,which suppresses and damages the materialistic character of marxist criticism. |
