西方文学伦理学批评:脉络与方法

Literary Ethical Criticism in the West:Genealogies and Methods

20世纪六七十年代的英美文学研究界,西方传统的人文主义伦理学批评几近消声,直到80年代末才再次回归,并呈现出蓬勃发展的势头。文学批评的这次"伦理学转向"有其深刻的思想史背景,在与各路思想资源的对话争鸣中,复兴后的文学伦理学批评又获得了一系列新的视角和方法。追溯西方文学伦理学批评嬗变轨迹,大致可以归纳出两条谱系:新亚里士多德主义和解构主义,两支伦理批评学派各具独特的问题意识和批评方法。前者传承了亚里士多德的伦理观和诗学观,主张通过文学获得伦理道德教育;后者借助后结构主义理论对文学进行伦理批评,强调文本意义的不确定性以及读者的阅读体验。

The literary ethical criticism in the humanist tradition nearly disappeared from the Anglo-American academia of literary study in the 1 960s and 1 970s,and until toward the end of 1 980s did it reemerge to the scene and begin to show momentum of rapid development since then.The so-called “ethical turn”in the field of literary studies was brought about by the profound intellectual development in humanities and social sciences from which the recovered literary ethical criticism gained a series of new perspectives and methods.Tracing its line of development, we may detect two major schools-the Neo-Aristotelian and the Deconstructive. Each of the two camps has its own understanding of such crucial concepts as text, other and reader,and proposes unique approaches to literary works accordingly. The first camp inherits Aristotelian ethics and poetics,valuing moral and ethical education through reading literature,while the second camp does ethical criticism by drawing from poststructuralist theories, emphasizing readers ’ reading experience as well as the ambiguity of textual meaning.