Text in Western Literary Theories

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.200316.014How to use a DOI?

Keywords

text, New Criticism, Structuralism, Cultural Criticism

Abstract

In various trends of western literary theories, text is always the one that literary theorists could be left out, especially after the turn of Linguistics. This paper delves into the fate of text under three major western literary theories, namely, New Criticism, Structuralism and Cultural Criticism. Individual text is being the center by the new critics, while a set of texts are discussed by structuralists. And cultural critics take text as a way to discuss politics. Furthermore, merits and drawbacks of their ways to deal with text will be mentioned in this paper. This research concludes that once text is created, its fate is out of control and it is literary theorists that decide text’s fate and then support their own ideas. And for contemporary literary theorists or critics in China, what needs to be done is to make a detailed analysis of the history and theoretic configuration of western literary theories on the basis of Chinese literary background, and then make effective interpretations and criticism.

Copyright

© 2020, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Jintao Ma
PY  - 2020
DA  - 2020/03/19
TI  - Text in Western Literary Theories
BT  - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Culture, Education and Economic Development of Modern Society (ICCESE 2020)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 53
EP  - 56
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.200316.014
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.200316.014
ID  - Ma2020
ER  -