Chen Shih-Hsiang's argument that Chinese literature is destined to be dominated by lyricism because lyrical spirit is a tradition in Chinese literature has a far-reaching scholarly influence. By tracing the development of the lyrical tradition of Chinese prose, this article summarizes three emotional patterns — "leaving and returning," "joy and worry," and "happiness and sorrow." In terms of lyrical standpoints and content, Western lyricism tend to focus on individual liberations and dreams of an ideal world, emphasizing subject value of individuals and the expression of self-feelings, while Chinese lyrical proses pay more attention to the unity of personal expression and sociality. In terms of lyrical techniques, Western lyricism are more explicit expressions of feelings, by projecting feelings on scenery. Such a strategy is also seen in Chinese lyrical prose, but more often than not, it implicitly combines the expressions of emotion with description of scenery. Chinese prose not only has its unique characteristics, grace and verve, but also contains the cultural spirit, cultural gene and emotional codes of the Chinese nation. It is a great literary heritage of China, and also a reliable source of cultural consciousness and cultural confidence.
Over the last century, the legitimacy of Chinese aesthetics has been gradually confirmed in the studies of aesthetics and the writings of the history of aesthetics by Chinese and Western scholars. Cultural exchanges between China and the West have promoted the indigenization of aesthetics in China and deconstructed the universality of Western aesthetics, thus giving rise to the plural concept of "world aesthetics", which paved the way for the modern construction of "Chinese aesthetics". Due to its importance, the way to interpret Chinese aesthetics has become "the meta-question" that promotes the study and writing of the history of "Chinese aesthetics".
Friedrich Kittler is an important media theorist and a unique critic of media literature. Kittler examines the discourse network constructed by the technical media between 1800s and 1900s, and concludes that "media determine our situation." This conclusion can be understood as a media ontology that emphasizes the materiality and the preexistence of technical media. An analysis of the relationship between Kittler's media theory and Foucault's discourse theory may reveal triple-aspected logic behind the formation of Kittler's media ontology and the logic behind the transition from issues concerning media ontology to issues concerning literature. Through his media ontology, Kittler makes the ontological argument that "literature is a system of writing techniques," And he further expands the arena of literary theory which is centered round "writing," "mediatedness" and "materiality,"and this theoretical vision is suffused with post-hermeneutics and post-historicism in its examination of literature and literary history.
In order to respond to Kyoo Lee's theses on reading, this essay focuses on obscurity and difficulty, terms often associated with modernism. Moving from a controversy opposing Mallarmé and Proust in the last decade of the 19th century to Lacan's use of a Mallarmean language when he describes how symptoms can be read, that is not by thinking naïvely that we are "poets" but by understanding that we are unconsciously scripted "poems," the essay posits a mediation provided by Ezra Pound when he invents both Comparative Literature and Translation Studies.
The concept of beauty has been abused in contemporary popular aesthetics, which attributes the beautiful to the superficial experience of human body and fails to understand the spirituality of true beauty. In contrast to beauty in everyday sense, true beauty exists in ecstasy, a holistic experience integrating body and mind, in which people may feel a transcendental sense of reality. Different from pathological illusion, the ecstatic sense of beauty signifies nature's manifestation in human life and testifies to the intrinsic harmony between humankind and the universe. Through the lens of ecstasy, this article examines true beauty in three dimensions: reflections on the conceptual abuse of beauty and traditional idealist aesthetics, mania theory's description of aesthetic phenomenon, and the distinction between aesthetic and pathological phenomena in ecstatic experiences. Overall, the ecstatic sense of beauty is the experiential basis of true beauty. It represents both the universe and the human being's advanced spirituality. Once occurred, it will fundamentally change the subject's outlook.
In the late 1920s, the debates about the nature, function, direction and position of "revolutionary literature" were accompanied by various conflicting voices. In each stage of the revolutionary literature developed afterwards, there were "alien" elements that diverged from literary mainstream and authoritative discourse. With the development of history, these "alien" authors constantly developed and finally formed a continuous genealogy of heresy. In the context where mainstream culture became increasingly conservative and ideological discipline turned stricter, they were gripped in a historical dilemma. Originally, Chen Duxiu and Lu Xun were two revolutionaries with the same ultimate goal, but they had different characteristics in aspects of personalities, behaviors and ways to pursue the goal, thus being the two sources of the "heretical quality" in revolutionary literature. From the perspective of deep spititual structure, the "heretical quality" of revolutionary literature contains a type of tension between the pursuit of modernity and the impulse of a modern nation-state.
