The definition of iconology you can see on the Internet generally refers to Balu of France, but in fact, Balu is only a fourth-rate scholar. Under the current background of smooth academic exchanges between China and the West, Balu really can only be regarded as a laggard. And "Rousseau's China illusion" is the subject of Dr. Li Huachuan, the great disciple of Professor Hua Meng. "Social collective imagination" is actually just something developed by bartholomew according to Paul Rico's theory. In fact, everyone who knows hermeneutics knows that his understanding of Rico is problematic.
Of course I can answer your question, but I'm too lazy to do it because it's useless to you and me. Here, just write down the definitions of subject science and image science for you. You can actually recite a definition of these things if you take the exam.
Philology studies the expression of some basic contents in literary works of different countries and times, as well as the attitudes and views of writers from different countries on these issues. It can not only pursue the spread and evolution of a theme, characters, motifs or themes in different national literature, but also conduct parallel research on similar themes, plots, characters, motifs and themes in literature with different cultural backgrounds.
Theme is the basic concept expressed through motif and characters, and it is the main idea and central idea of the work. Themes include themes.
Motif: the spiritual phenomenon that human beings have been repeating in the past and will continue to repeat in the future.
Themes and motifs are different, but they can be mixed in many cases.
First of all, iconology is a relatively new subject in comparative literature. "Image first makes literary historians doubt. The foreign image belongs to the imagination of a culture or a society. It transcends the original meaning of literature in all aspects and becomes the research object of anthropology or history. " This makes iconology neither please literary purists nor nationalists. However, even though iconology is facing a complicated situation where many disciplines meet, it still becomes an inevitable topic in people's research. Interdisciplinary is not only a difficult point in iconology research, but also one of the characteristics of iconology research. The existence of image research in literary works lies in the connection between society and literature. "Literature is at least the expression of society, because through literature, we can decipher the illusion that a society produces on others." This is the theoretical source of iconology in comparative literature. Literature records the author's inner feelings, which are mostly inspired by external influences. Therefore, most scholars who maintain iconology don't want people to understand iconology as simple "sociology" and "national psychology". Lian Wenxue's description of foreign countries is only one aspect of iconology. However, only by excavating the "other image" in literary works and how this image was created and how it survived can the most "fundamental" problems of literature be revealed.
Second, the problem of "image" The focus of iconology research is the problem of foreign "image" in literary works. Foreign countries should belong to the category of others relative to the subject, that is, they are different from the exclusiveness of the subject. Image is a kind of cultural or social imagination, which is sometimes reflected in works as a copy of social collective imagination, but it can also be a "utopia" full of literature, but in the final analysis, it can all be included in the category of social collective imagination. The social collective imagination here has both similarities and differences. And "image" can not only intervene in the spiritual life of society, but also be an overview of the overall face of society. Iconology is different from pure social research because of the literariness of "image" in iconology, that is, illusion. "It mainly regards the literary image as a mirage, a symbol of ideology and utopia." For researchers, it is more interesting to study the fantasy of this kind of "image". "It is to study how the images of lines and colors constitute a specific description of foreign countries in a certain historical period." Image is not only an emotion and disgust expressed by the receiver to the "other", but also a symbolic language. This kind of language has all the reflections when looking at the "other", and it has the side of "looking at the subject" which is different from the object. In literature, it is ideal, and it also has the "utopia" nature that Hammer said, and this "utopia" nature is the most taboo. "Image" has both identity and difference. In fact, the process of writing images is not a programming process, but a process of trying to abstract a culture or something more complicated and unspeakable into concrete words, that is, a symbolic process. In this process, many complex richness will inevitably be lost. As one of the manifestations of "image", formulaic language is just like this.