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Why is everyone talking about culture? This is a question related to the opportunity for contemporary western literary criticism to move towards cultural studies. Trey Eagleton, a contemporary British scholar, replied: "Because there is an important topic to talk about, everything has become related to culture. This fashionable topic in the western left-wing intellectuals actually belongs to the dogma of culturalism "(1). It is easy to further analyze the reasons. First of all, in the post-war West, culture became an important force in material production for the first time in modern times. Secondly, culture was a field of political struggle and a part of the media of political conflict after the 1960s. (2) In this sense: "Culturalism belongs to a specific historical time and space". (3) This actually shows that cultural research is a highly contextualized activity. Contextualization means that contemporary western cultural studies have their own specific cultural time-space frame of reference. It is from the concrete and true social, historical, national or political context that contemporary western literary criticism chooses and practices its own transformation mechanism, that is, it moves towards cultural research, crosses the barrier of text analysis and becomes a kind of "pan-cultural" criticism. Because globalization has become the basic realistic condition or context of contemporary cultural and literary analysis. Many cultural phenomena that have been or are being formed in the trend of globalization, like a huge gravitational field, bring all cultural activities including literary criticism, cultural criticism, humanistic thinking and academic research into their field of vision. Among them, Wen? Raynham? What happened to Huan Xian? What's the matter with you? What's the matter with you? Hey? Reveal the secret? Do you want to pray for peaches? ⒅ ⒅ ⒅ ⒅ ⒅ ⒅ ⒅? Nan Lan also asked the remaining lotus scabbard to cut/burn Cong Fei? Hey? Does the scabbard owe you money? ) In the era when metaphor and poetry are dying out, can literary criticism once again undertake the' meaning inquiry' to the world? Is the classic literature after death going to flatter the ugliness of each era from now on? Bend your knees to everything? How to solve the literary dilemma in contemporary industrial civilization? Can female criticism, which internalizes the reading strategy and value of male centralism, get rid of the cultural shackles of patriarchy and finally rebuild its own criticism or discourse standards? Can marginal non-mainstream literature (such as black literature, minority literature and third world literature) get rid of the oppression and control of mainstream social and cultural violence? As the "text periphery" of literature, is history a continuous myth fabricated by unified ideology? Under the historical appearance full of other different and destructive factors, can the complex cultural operation mechanism be revealed? Can the "containment strategy" hidden by ideology reveal its potential social and cultural content in the cultural analysis of the text? Today, language has become the internal text scale of all life, does the boundary between literature and culture still exist? Is criticism still an established genre? Are literature and culture intertextual or independent?
Answering the above questions means that you should not only be a literary critic, but also a cultural critic. As David Diches, a contemporary British scholar, said, the criticism of realism should be like this: "It relates itself to the synthesis of all cultural activities, and the production of literature is only an unfinished fragment." (5) This shows that there is an invisible umbilical cord between criticism and culture.
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Then, what is the actual situation of contemporary western literary criticism? Let's examine the critical practice of cultural theories such as deconstruction, new historicism, feminism and western Marxism, from which we may get more convincing enlightenment.
In the practice of deconstruction literary criticism, we can clearly see that deconstruction criticism is striding over text analysis and moving towards pan-cultural criticism. Derrida profoundly reveals the metaphysical fallacy of binary opposition between philosophy and poetry caused by western traditional philosophical culture in the article White Myth. In Derrida's view, poetry (or metaphor) is the life of philosophy, while western traditional culture has always praised philosophy and suppressed poetry (Plato advocated expelling poets in the Republic). This "Logocentrism" hierarchical order view fully shows the fiction and violence of western traditional culture. This kind of self-fiction and cultural violence are everywhere in the writing and reading of literary texts. Derrida, starting from the essence of "difference" between language and words, thinks that the meaning reference of language and words is just a game that can indicate the difference, which determines that the writing or reading of any text (literary text, artistic text, philosophical text and historical text) is always in a movement of self-deconstruction and self-reference. In this way, there is an intertextuality between articles (that is, any article absorbs and transforms other articles), and the difference between literary articles, philosophical articles and historical articles becomes meaningless. Therefore, literary criticism has become a broad cultural criticism. It is in this sense that Derrida asserts: "Today, it is better to declare that the irreducibility of writing and the failure of Logocentrism are specific aspects and forms of literary practice." (6)
Answering Fran? ois ewald's question, "Why should literature establish such an important object for you?" On this issue, Derrida further elaborated his pan-cultural criticism position in literary research. Derrida said that what is important for him is the experience of writing, which will leave traces. "The possibility of this trace undoubtedly goes beyond the so-called art or literature, beyond the basic law of recognizing that name under any circumstances" (7). Therefore, literature is "associated with so-called truth, novelty, illusion, science, philosophy, law, rights and democracy" in a unique way. (8)
This literary research orientation of pan-cultural criticism was further elaborated in roland barthes's later text theory. In the article Death of the Author, Barthes said: "A text is a fabric composed of various quotations, which come from thousands of cultural sources" (9) "A text is composed of various writings, which come from many cultures and talk to each other, parody each other and argue with each other". (10) In the text theory, Barthes further emphasized: "In a text, there are various other texts that can be recognized to varying degrees, for example, texts of pre-culture and texts of surrounding cultures". (1 1) "Any text is intertextuality, and the concept of intertextuality is something that brings social content to the text theory, and it is the whole speech that comes to the text first" (12).
In the practice of deconstructive literary criticism of Yale School in the United States, the position of pan-cultural criticism is particularly thorough. By reading Rousseau's Freedom of Belief, Paul de Man found that there is no essential difference between literary texts and non-literary texts in metaphorical structure and its deconstruction. He said: "We found that the structure of freedom of belief is actually the same as that of Rousseau's novel: the deconstruction of the metaphor model (called' love' in the new green thought and' judgment' in freedom of belief) led to this metaphor model being replaced by a similar system in this paper." Therefore, "from the rhetorical mode, (13) through this rhetorical reading, Paul de Man removed the boundary between literature and all non-literary texts, and extended his deconstruction theory from pure literary texts to all cultural texts. His literary interpretation has become a pan-cultural interpretation or linguistic analysis. This orientation of pan-cultural criticism is also reflected in hillis Miller's interpretation of Paradise Lost and Wuthering Heights, and Geoffrey Hartman's interpretation of Eliot's Sacred Jungle.
In the eyes of new historians, the task of literary critics is not so much to eliminate the textuality of literature as to re-examine all social phenomena from the essence of literature. Literature is not parasitic or attached to historical facts, but in a symbolic ideological space with historical facts. In the same space, literature participated in the historical process and the construction of reality. (14) There is a famous saying in New Historicism: "Text is historical, and history is textual". Based on the intertextuality between literature and history, the new historicism abandoned the previous research model that gave literature a special status, and replaced it with a research model that treated literature and non-literature equally, placing literature in the framework of all cultural articles. Therefore, canon, unofficial history, biography, non-literary decrees, documents, newspapers, letters, diaries, travel notes, archives, celebrations, religious witchcraft or folk activities have all entered the literary criticism field of vision of new historians, because in the eyes of new historians, "history is a story composed of many voices and many forces, and not only rulers, the strong, the marginalized and the weak are also playing a role." "The coexistence of literature, non-literature and social texts and the method of cross-cultural integration should not be ignored" (15), which makes the literary criticism of new historicism actually become a kind of "cultural poetics". This tendency of cultural criticism is particularly prominent in the article Towards Cultural Poetics by Stephen Grimbold Ray, a new American historian. The pan-cultural interpretation of Renaissance literature and art, especially Shakespeare's plays by New Historicism highlights concrete critical practice. For example, in Shakespeare's plays, there are many descriptions about sexual violence, lust and the power relationship between men and women (such as the interweaving of power and lust in Hamlet: Hamlet's mother and her uncle will be empowered immediately after they are combined). Meng Youtu, an American new historian, analyzed that this ostentation and extravagance of "eroticizing" politics and economy or politicizing lust shows that the queen is a kind of culture. Shakespeare brought contemporary or past society and history into drama to dramatize it, and redefined and shaped culture with artistic dress-up, appropriation and play. ( 16)
In a sense, feminism and cultural studies are synonymous. The premise of feminist literary criticism is based on the answers to the following questions: What is the relationship between female culture and literature, and between male culture and literature? Can non-mainstream female criticism summarize its own methods and theories by reading its own literary articles extensively and carefully? Can the cultural silence and blank in female literary works be fully revealed in the analysis of female talents against male cultural traditions? What cultural dimensions does female writing contain as a heterogeneous experience of gender differences? What kind of cultural discrimination is implied in the "penis criticism" similar to the academic measurement of female bust and hip circumference? What are the cultural metaphors of male writing traditions such as fairy, shrew, witch and femme fatale?
It is from the dual cultural identity of women (both members of the whole culture and participants in women's culture) that feminism founded its own theory of female subculture as the basis of literary criticism. In their view, women's writing can only be a kind of "double discourse" writing, which always embodies the social, literary and cultural traditions of two groups-the silent group and the ruling group. (17) is reflected in women's criticism, women's letters, diaries, women's manuals, women's novels, sociological works, medical literature and magazines, sex manuals, birth manuals, news reports, political or literary declarations, etc. They all entered the intertextual interpretation of female literary symbols, forming a critical picture of "cross-cultural montage". The construction of literary standards is not only the result of personal authority, but also involves the non-collusion cultural network of publishers, critics, editors, literary critics and teachers. ( 18)
In the western Marxist camp, various literary theories, such as Louis Altug's symptomatic reading theory, Pierre mcquarrie's literary production theory, Fredric Jameson's Marxist hermeneutics, Trey Eagleton's ideological production theory, Adorno's negative aesthetics, etc., all have a common theoretical feature, that is, literary research is more responsible for explaining cultural significance. In other words, "through the ideology used by the author as a material, we can see the role of universal social, cultural, political and ethical concepts in forming the main forms of a specific society and its own nature." (19) Such literary criticism is bound to have a broader cultural research nature. For example, Adorno once analyzed a series of absurd dramas such as Waiting for Godot, Happy Days and Doomsday by the absurd dramatist Beckett, and explained the critical function of literature and art by exposing the alienation reality of capitalist society. By analyzing Hemingway's Castle Peak in Africa, Jameson asked Marxist literary critics to reveal the repressed subconscious from the mysterious surface structure of the work, while Eagleton regarded literary activities as an ideological production activity.
From the above analysis, we can see that contemporary western literary criticism is no longer just a single text analysis. It has widely absorbed the theoretical achievements of political science, linguistics, history, psychoanalysis, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, history, art history and other disciplines, and has become a cultural creation and re-creation activity. As Juliet Flower McCanell, a contemporary American scholar, said, the key to contemporary literary criticism is that it is a view that Marxism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction are also adhered to by feminism, new historicism and ethnic and minority studies to some extent. (20)
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In the process of cross-cultural integration, contemporary western literary criticism has formed a kind of cultural poetics. Although the methods are different, they present several distinctive features of * * *.
The first is the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary western literary criticism. This interdisciplinary nature is based on cross-cultural integration, which can especially reflect the cultural research orientation of contemporary western literary criticism. This interdisciplinary nature is not simply pluralistic coexistence, but absorbs pluralistic theories in a deconstructive way to achieve the purpose of rebuilding a new literary research theory. For example, feminist literary criticism was not an independent discipline in the traditional sense from the beginning. It exists in and is separated from the existing disciplines. It was once considered as "non-academic politics with only opinions, no theories and no methods". It is intertwined with feminist politics, women's history, feminist anthropology and ethnology, ethnic studies, gender studies and women's psychology. Black feminist literary criticism, which arose in the late 1970s, takes exploring the obvious literary tradition formed by gender and race in black feminist literature as the principle of literary criticism. Feminist literary criticism in the 1980s focused on the role of race and gender in dual culture and ethnic communication. If the new historicism literary criticism pays attention to the interdisciplinary study of literature and history, then the western Marxist literary criticism organically combines literature and politics. Deconstruction literary criticism involves philosophy, philology, linguistics, psychology and other disciplines.
This interdisciplinary nature directly leads to the diversity of contemporary western literary criticism methods. For example, French feminist literary criticism fully absorbed Derrida's deconstruction analysis method, comprehensively criticized the Logocentrism that male culture (or literature) is superior to female culture (or literature), and put forward its own theory of "female writing". Contrary to the traditional western concept that thinking, body and language are integrated, this theory emphasizes the difference between women's desire language and men's desire language (the former emphasizes rationality, logic and hierarchy, while the latter is anti-rational, anti-logic and anti-hierarchy), and holds that women's writing is best at expressing themselves with body language in the repression of culture and society, which has a powerful destructive and subversive force on traditional metaphysics. At the same time, psychoanalysis has penetrated into feminist literary criticism. The relationship between desire and language has always been an important topic in feminist literary criticism. Revealing the structure and changes of ideology from the silence, blank and contradiction of literary texts is a productive exploration field of "Marxist-feminist literary collective". It can be seen that interdisciplinary cultural integration and methodological diversification have become the dominant trend of contemporary western literary criticism.
This interdisciplinary nature also directly forms the open feature of contemporary western literary criticism. In the western literary criticism from the beginning of this century to the 1960s, formalism literary criticism (including Russian formalism, British and American new criticism, French structuralist literary criticism, etc. ) has always occupied a dominant position, and the self-discipline and internal research of literature have always been highly valued. After the 1960s and 1970s, this dominant tendency was gradually replaced by cultural criticism. Even American deconstructionist critic Miller has to admit that his interest in literary research "has changed from rhetorical" internal "research to" external "research of literature. Determine its position in the background of psychology, history or sociology. " (2 1) Not only does the research interest change from inside to outside, but the research object also changes from classic literature or elite literature to marginal women's literature, minority literature, third world literature or popular literature. As far as criticism itself is concerned, it is no longer a single text structure analysis or rhetorical interpretation of language, but a constantly developing cultural creation activity or process. As Linda Hatch, a contemporary American scholar, said, this criticism has "transcended a fixed or fixed explanation, and it is a kind of' poetics' and a constantly changing theoretical structure. Through it, we not only arrange our cultural knowledge, but also arrange our critical process. This will not be poetics in the sense of structuralist language, but will go beyond the study of literary discourse and become the study of cultural practice and theory. " (22)
Secondly, it is a criticism of contemporary western literary criticism. This kind of criticism is manifested in the tendency of political resistance and cultural criticism in contemporary western literary criticism. For example, in the eyes of new historians, every dominant culture contains the denial of its obvious mode and core value, which is embodied in the acquiescence to the potential opposing mode and marginal value. Therefore, the real overall model of each culture is produced in the functional balance between the officially provided and officially opposed models. (23) Literary criticism should reveal the bipolar opposition between the dominant culture and the repressed cultural other, which makes the new historians have an obvious tendency of political resistance because they regard literary criticism as an important way to intervene in life. In the western Marxist camp, Jameson also emphasized the "symptom" analysis of ideology, so as to reveal the special ways and means of ideology to contain history and culture. Zhan's own interpretation of For Whom the Bell Tolls is a prominent example. Zhan believes that the phenomenon of "tough guy worship" in For Who the Bell Tolls is a symbolic metaphor of the author's "personal fable" or "self-dramatization". Facing the alien commercial society, the tough guy image is an imaginative solution to the actual contradiction, and Hemingway's novel creation is only a strategic activity of the author himself to contain the capitalist society. In this sense, Hemingway is criticizing the existing society and culture with ideology (literature). According to the feminist critic Showalter, the feminist criticism theory "is a scheme that defines the feminist literary text and feminist criticism text as the sum of the differences of' revision, possession and subversion' and' type, structure, sound and clue'". (24) This kind of revision, possession, subversion and the pursuit of differences are exactly women's political resistance and cultural challenges. In his new book, The End of the Empire:1Women and Consciousness in English Literature in the Early 8th Century, L Brown put forward more clearly: "I want to redefine the direction of literary research in the 8th century and establish a comprehensive analysis integrating the oppressed classes, so that the research in this field can advance the liberal political purposes of feminism, anti-imperialism and anti-racial discrimination ... The criticism of consciousness should be to reproduce the past." It can be seen that there is essential difference between contemporary western literary criticism and traditional positivist literary research which flaunts objectivity, and it shows obvious ethical orientation or value position with a highly practical spirit of participating in reality. In other words, contemporary western literary criticism has a realistic spirit of struggle and interventionist belief in cultural studies.
Third, the strategic and diagnostic nature of contemporary western literary criticism. The strategy originates from the realistic conditions faced by contemporary western literary criticism. Faced with the powerful capitalist cultural logic of reality, literary criticism can achieve the purpose of political resistance and cultural criticism by intervening in reality, which can only be realized in the strategic analysis and criticism of literary texts. For example, the cultural resistance of deconstruction is an obvious strategic activity. Instead of criticizing traditional culture from the front, it exposes the essence of "Logocentrism" in western culture by subverting the binary opposition structure of language's signifier and signified. In Yale School, Paul de Man's interpretation of Proust's Memories of Time Past is to clarify the boundary between literary texts and all non-literary texts from the rhetorical features of language, and then extend his rhetorical deconstruction theory to human beings and the whole social system. The analysis of power structure in new historicism literary criticism also mostly starts from the carrier of power structure-discourse form. In addition, in western Marxism, Jameson's ideological "symptom" analysis and Altug Gesay's "symptom reading" are both strategic literary and cultural interpretations. It is in this strategic text analysis and criticism that the political resistance tendency and cultural criticism tendency of contemporary western literary criticism are hidden, which makes the critical practice more complicated.
Because political resistance and cultural criticism are carried out in hidden strategic activities, the practical activities of contemporary western literary criticism are often diagnostic. This diagnostic feature is that the choice of theories and methods of contemporary western literary criticism often depends on the questions it raises, and the questions depend on their context or background. The awareness of problems and context makes literary or cultural researchers often adopt a diagnostic reading and analysis method to analyze culture or literature. "Just as physicians or psychoanalysts need to quickly check the details of patients' physical or psychological symptoms to diagnose measles or schizophrenia cases, so as to implement much-needed treatment, practitioners of cultural studies also quickly check the obvious characteristics of works from time to time and grasp the other side of the special culture it represents to diagnose it. Its reading orientation pays more attention to culture than the work itself, although it recognizes the principle of difference in each culture. " (25) This diagnostic nature is bound to extend logically: contemporary western literary criticism pays more attention to the theme, meaning, thought, context, politics and society, rather than the internal facts of the text such as language, structure and rhetoric.