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Article
International Politics of Western Literary Theory: Literary Theory as Doctrine and as Discipline
Author(s)
LIN Jinghua
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DOI:10.17265/2328-2177/2023.11.001
Affiliation(s)
Capital Normal University, Beijing, China
ABSTRACT
European literary criticism was rapidly transformed into literary theory through the United States after Rene Wellek and Austin Warren’s textbook Theory of Literary Theory by Harcourt, Brace and Co. (1949). Within a short period of time, American new criticism, European psychoanalysis, semiotics, structuralism, hermeneutics, deconstructivism, and so on, as well as the western Marxism, feminism, new historicism, post-colonial criticism, and cultural studies, all the critical methods little referenced to postwar Western ideology and Soviet Ideology, and are even known for their profound criticism of some problems in capitalist society. These intuitively scientific or neutral literary theories flourished during the Cold War years that contained the Soviet Union. During this period, “political correctness” not only influenced the direction of social development in the West, but also directly influenced the academic pattern and the development trend of universities at that time, so that “literary criticism”, which was originally only based on personal experience, benefited and became “literary theory” in the discipline and curriculum system. As a result, the discipline of literary theory, which benefited from the Cold War pattern, is often in conflict with the specific literary theory that transcends ideology. However, the Cold War ended with the failure of the Soviet Union and its socialist realism theory system, and the western literary theory unexpectedly gained full legitimacy like Fukuyama’s “the end of history”. In the post-Cold War era, Western literary critics reasonably expanded the controversial theories and this has become the most concerned topic for 30 years. Thus, the international politics of the disguised Western literary theory was highlighted. Such Western literary theory has been generalized in China in the last 40 years, because Chinese academic yet has not understood the difference between theory as discipline and theory as doctrine, even anti-western in recent years.
KEYWORDS
Cold war, literary theory, international politics, literary theory as discipline
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