“诗言志”与“文以载道”论辩的历史审度——周作人散文理论批评研究

A Historical Critique on the Debate between “Poem Expressing Aspirations” and “Writings Conveying Ethics” in Zhou Zuoren’s Concept of Prose

“诗言志”与“文以载道”,或称“言志派”与“载道派”,是周作人散文理论批评的两个关键词,也是他研究中国文学/散文史的一对重要范畴。长期以来,学界对其褒贬不一,争议颇多。本文评述周作人“言志”与“载道”说的生成和演变,同时探讨批评者对其论说的辨析和修正,力图还原论辩的历史现场,对论辩各方的观点进行客观的历史审度,并从文学通变和话语建构角度重新审度“言志”与“载道”说的是非得失,寻绎出有益的文论资源与学理启示。

“Poetry as the expression of aspirations”and“writing as a vehicle for Tao,”and these two ideas,later referred to be“aspiration-expression school”and“Tao-conveying school,”become a pair of two keywords in Zhou Zuoren’s literary criticism.However,this pair of critical terms has provoked persistent controversies.This paper is a critical review of the generation and evolution of Zhou Zuoren’s two critical keywords.It discusses how his theory is interpreted and revised by critics,and it attempts to put critics’views of Zhou’s theorization into the historical perspective by contextualizing them into the reductionist historical specificities.It paper reevaluates the gains and losses in Zhou’s two keywords from the perspective of literary evolution and discursive construction,and concludes with some theoretical implications for the study of prose.