China Social Science Review

No.4, 2020

 

Research on the Preface and Postscript to Zhu Guangqian’s Shilun

（Abstract）

 

Wan Xiaoping

 

We provide an indepth analysis of Zhu Guangqian’s contribution to poetics through the prefaces and postscripts to the three main editions of his Shilun (On Poetry), clarifying various academic misinterpretations by reviewing his original intentions. On the basis of a method of comparative poetics in which “both East and West serve as both essence and function,” Zhu Guangqian achieved the perfect union of science and the humanities and of Western poetics and traditional Chinese poetics through the comparison, interpretation and discovery of East and West. In addition to Wang Guowei’s “realm of the self” and “realm of no self,” he proposed a “realm of things” and a “realm beyond things.” Here he was not making a fresh start; rather, he was introducing the spirit of scientific analysis to give us a deeper understanding of the poetic realm. The realm of poetry conjoins emotion and imagery, from subject-object dualism to the “differentiated identity” of the dissolution of opposites. This is unlike the “undifferentiated identity” of traditional poetry, with its style of “random thoughts.”