二十世纪西方文艺批评理论.docVIP

Twentieth Century Western Critical Theories 二十世纪西方文艺批评理论 Zhu Gang 朱刚 上海外语教育出版社，2001 2005年第四次印刷 Introduction This sourcebook comes out of a need for basic texts of the twentieth century Western literary and cultural theories. The current volume is meant solely for pedagogical purposes, i.e., for graduate courses on contemporary Western literary theory. Each unit forms a critical “school” (in the broad sense), starting with a critical survey of the school under discussion. For each critic, the sourcebook provides a sketchy introduction, a selection of the critic’s work, some necessary notes to the texts (reduced to the minimum for a smooth reading.), followed by study questions based on the essay selected for better understanding and class discussion, and finally books and articles recommended for further reading. The book chooses to examine in a roughly chronological order some major Western critical theories of the twentieth century, from Russian Formalism in the early decades to, for instance, the Cultural Studies in the nineties. In addition to a close reading of some carefully selected texts and a survey of current knowledge in this field, the course seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to literature, to show what kind of knowledge is involved and what forms of inquiry exist in this area, how different means of analysis are used, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. The chief objective of the book is to raise the students’ awareness of the importance of being critical and of the critical theory, discuss with them some influential speculations on and critical approaches to literature, and use them in textual analysis. It will concentrate on a number of questions, such as the locus of literary meaning, the status of the text, the role of the reader, the function of language in literary exegesis, the referentiality of literature, and the relation of literature and society. These questions are of