General introduction DOI 10.1515/arcadia-2015-0001
The editors of arcadia are pleased and honored to print in this issue a set of papers associated with Professor Nie Zhenzhao’s theory of ethical literary criticism. Both because of the topic and because of the unique effort to bring together Chinese and Western scholars, we regard the occasion so special that we shall depart from our usual reluctance to write an introduction to a special issue, and preface this collection with a few introductory reflections of our own. We want to underline the value of the theory and to indicate how, in our view, it could be broadened to bolster its persuasiveness.
Professor Zhenzhao has developed his theory on the basis of an astonishingly wide range of literature, which runs, on the Western side, from Sophocles to D.H. Lawrence and beyond. Ethical approaches to literature have a venerable tradition in Europe and the US, but Professor Zhenzhao tackles the issue from a new angle. He finds “a deficit of ethical engagement” in the Western formalist, cultural, and political approaches to literary criticism, and proposes a new approach, which regards moral enlightenment as literature’s primary function. A literary critic should not make subjective moral judgments of literary works but, rather, unfold objectively their ethical content, and read literature as an expres-sion of ethics. One of the first requisites in a search for the ethical value in a given work, is, according to Professor Zhenzhao, the examination of the works particu-lar historical context. The critic’s personal ethical values should not enter into the picture. However, the requested careful reconstruction of the given historical context as the prerequisite of a properly ethical as against the rejected moral criticism recalls, in the European tradition, the historicist approach, which has been in the meantime exposed to serious critiques, by New Historicism among the others.
Disregarding this critique, Professor Zhenzhao remains on a transsubjective level in sketching a general history, within which literature emerged as a reflection of the first human communal ties, which he characterizes as ethical. Most critics and readers in the East as well as in the West will surely agree with this view, but many of them, on both sides, will probably ask, why he associates ethical concern only with written texts (literature), excluding thereby a vast body of oral fiction, poetry, and drama, which includes such fundamental creations as Gilgamesh epos and the oral versions of the Homeric epics. These creative works of orality were eventually written up but only after centuries of oral transmission. Why does Professor Zhenzhao find no ethical value in orally transmitted lyrical
Professor Zhenzhao has developed his theory on the basis of an astonishingly wide range of literature, which runs, on the Western side, from Sophocles to D.H. Lawrence and beyond. Ethical approaches to literature have a venerable tradition in Europe and the US, but Professor Zhenzhao tackles the issue from a new angle. He finds “a deficit of ethical engagement” in the Western formalist, cultural, and political approaches to literary criticism, and proposes a new approach, which regards moral enlightenment as literature’s primary function. A literary critic should not make subjective moral judgments of literary works but, rather, unfold objectively their ethical content, and read literature as an expres-sion of ethics. One of the first requisites in a search for the ethical value in a given work, is, according to Professor Zhenzhao, the examination of the works particu-lar historical context. The critic’s personal ethical values should not enter into the picture. However, the requested careful reconstruction of the given historical context as the prerequisite of a properly ethical as against the rejected moral criticism recalls, in the European tradition, the historicist approach, which has been in the meantime exposed to serious critiques, by New Historicism among the others.
Disregarding this critique, Professor Zhenzhao remains on a transsubjective level in sketching a general history, within which literature emerged as a reflection of the first human communal ties, which he characterizes as ethical. Most critics and readers in the East as well as in the West will surely agree with this view, but many of them, on both sides, will probably ask, why he associates ethical concern only with written texts (literature), excluding thereby a vast body of oral fiction, poetry, and drama, which includes such fundamental creations as Gilgamesh epos and the oral versions of the Homeric epics. These creative works of orality were eventually written up but only after centuries of oral transmission. Why does Professor Zhenzhao find no ethical value in orally transmitted lyrical
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