Western Literary Theories in China: Reception, Influence and Resistance

Abstract

The recent history of comparative literature in China is closely linked with the appropriation of Western theory by Chinese scholars. In the following we would like to relate some aspects of that history – which very much mirrors the fraught history of China’s relationship with the West – and survey some of the related developments in literary theory and criticism, bearing in mind that one of the problems still facing the introduction of Western theory in China today is the perceived fundamental, or ‘essential’, difference of Eastern and Western thought, and hence of their cultures and literatures. Modern and contemporary Western literary and cultural theories began entering China on a large scale around 1980. Prior to that, the field of literary studies in China had for decades seen political criticism guided and dominated by another vein of Western thought, namely Marxist theory, which reached its ultra-‘Left’ extreme during the Cultural Revolution that lasted from 1966 to 1976. During that period, literary theory and criticism were treated only as political tools for reinforcing the struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie.2 After the end of the Cultural Revolution, China adopted a policy of economic reform, opening the country up to the outside world. Alongside the flow – if not torrent – of Western capital and commodities, various brands of Western literary theory and criticism entered China. All these schools, whether fashionable (such as feminism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis) or out of fashion (such as New Criticism, phenomenology, structuralist narratology) in the West, were invariably new and contemporary to Chinese scholars. This large-scale introduction into China of Western theories from the 1980s on is primarily to be accounted for by the country’s new-found post-‘Cultural Revolution’ interest in modernity and modernization. The beginnings of China’s