Imagery beyond images (IbIs) evolves from the infusion of subjective affect into object or event images in aesthetic activities, during the process of which the subject perceives object and event images in the form of imagination-ignited aesthetic experience. IbIs results from the subject's contemplation on physical images and therefore constitutes a creation out of the empty and an expansion of time and space. IbIs depends on transforms physical images. It shows itself as a symbiosis of emptiness and haveness and even goes beyond imagery per se to the extent of pointing to infinity. As IbIs is built on the subject's aesthetic experience, it influences the subject's perception of object and event images and contributes to the similitude in the representation of physical images. IbIs holdss rich expressivity in its free form. Artistic idea-imagery includes both perceptible physical images and the artist's imaginary IbIs, based on which the recipients may engender their own IbIs through imagination. Artists' creation relies on IbIs as a means to enhance imagery's communicative power, allowing space for re-creation.
The cataloguing method in Fan Ye's Book of the Later Han Dynasty started the mode to categorize literary works on the basis of writing styles (genre) with author's names. This mode was not constructed by Fan Ye from his understanding of the concepts of literary styles and related written materials during the Southern dynasties; instead, it was a description of the configurations and concepts of literary styles during the Eastern Han Dynasty based on his mastery of related historical materials. Therefore, this mode was historically characterized. The historical specificities implied in the method encompass, the compiling status of various writing styles, the anthologization principles and examplification, etc. This mode can be argued as a proof that the practice of anthologizing literary works prevailing in the much later period had actually formed during the Eastern Han dynasty. It also implies a relatively conscious distinction between not only different genres but also between different subgenres within literary writing as the literary collections (ji) was distinguished from Confucian classics (jing) and historical records (shi) while within in literary collections rhymed and unrhymed writing had also been distinguished. Therefore, the paper maintains that the cataloguing method in The Book of the Later Han Dynasty marked the emergence of conscious conceptualization of literariness during the Eastern Han dynasty.
Hong Mai's prefaces to Yijian Zhi (Record of the Listener) are of great significance in ways that they not only help readers understand his conscious construction of novel theory but also enable him to develop strong vitality from the process of compilation. The interaction between the perspective of a historian and that of an allegorist reveals his life experiences and rational thinking during the process of compilation. The stories in Yinjian Zhi are legendary in nature, and so is the process of compilation as reflected in his series of prefaces. To a certain extent, this "double legendary nature" is a mirror of the social zeitgeist in Hong's time.
Ezra Pound's (1885-1972) literary career consists of two mutually enhancing constituents: translation and creation, which, as a whole, serve as an experimental field that has enriched his imagistic and vorticist poetics, including his poetics of translation. These three dimensions are closely related to his (un)intentional creative transforming and misreading of classical Chinese literature and philosophy. Pound's poetry creation and free translation show strong stylistic consciousness and strategies, but this has largely remains largely unexplored by academic research. His stylistic strategies take such forms as English haiku, the defamiliarization or foregrounding of ideograms, and the stylistic collage, and these innovations not only set canonical examples for modern English poetry, but also pointed to a rethinking of the nature of and the interrelation between translation, creation, and poetics.
Onomatology of things develops into a modern discipline through scholars such as Aoki Masaru and Yang Zhi Shui in the past decades. This new discipline is distinct from traditional onomatology in that it is guided by positivism and distances itself from the exegetical tradition of Confucian classics study, and its scope of study has expanded to cover such areas as everyday cuisine, clothing, and handicraft that had traditionally been considered as "trivial enquiries." Its methodological connection with the tradition lies in its philological and textual approaches with an emphasis on the study of "things." The discrepancy between traditional methodologies and modern focuses calls for a new approach to modern onomatological study of things, Aoki Masaru used novels and encyclopedia as raw material and Yang Zhi Shui probes into the relationship between onomatology and literary research, both of which reflect the call, while their focus on names points to the essential pursuit of onomatology. Furthermore, from the perspective of disciplinary autonomy, focusing on names while studying things helps establish the boundary of modern onomatology of things.
In the history of sociology of art, the sociologists such as Marxist, Bourdieu and Becker used the sociological method to study arts, and developed our understanding of arts. But they did not pay attention to the specificity of art, what they did was just as the colonialism of sociology in the field of art, and reduced art into general social factors. This caused the criticisms of some sociologists of art. Wolff claimed that we cannot reduce art into economic base or ideology, and we should pay attention to its aesthetic and formal factors; Heinich argued that art was a value system of specificity, which could not be reduced; Hennion and Benzecry thought that the taste was a condition of passion, and could not be reduced into the tactics of social distinction. DeNora claimed that the power of art came from the interaction between people and art, and kept a place for the specificity of art in this interaction. Their idea on the specificity of art was a balance to the reductionism of art, and was helpful for the development of Chinese sociology of art.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno's concept of the culture industry remains a powerful description of the fate of art, literature and other cultural products in an era where media and information technology have made culture more industrial and reifying than ever before. We revisit this concept, tracing it forward from Walter Benjamin's initial contributions and proceeding onward the work of Herbert Marcuse against the backdrop of Marx's theory of commodity fetishism. We provide a brief description of historical origins with David Hawkes' works on the emergence of commodity fetishism in 16th-century England and carry this forward to Joseph S. Nye's discussions of the more contemporary phenomenon of soft power. Returning to Horkheimer and Marcuse's concerns for the logic underlying capitalist reification, as well as Adorno's longstanding concern that a culture industry could not produce a socialist consciousness (contrary to Benjamin's optimism), and recalling Marx's admonition that capitalism and nationalism are essentially the same road, we question whether there has ever been a socialist art or literature in China or anywhere else, whether one is possible, and whether we should concern ourselves firstly with products (e.g., soft power, media censorship, propaganda) or the mode of production that produces them.
