Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No. 8, 2023

 

The Generative and Interpretive Paths of Marxist Literary Theory

(Abstract)

 

Lai Daren

 

Marxist literary theory has a uniqueness that stems from the intellectual system of historical materialism and forms the generative path of practice theory and the interpretive path of ideological literary theory. The former is manifested as follows. From the perspective of the inherent characteristics of literary practice activities, people view literature as an “artistic method of grasping the world,” a special conceptual form that reflects social reality and a special intellectual production, namely artistic production. The latter is reflected as follows: ideological literary theory is used to observe literary phenomena in the development of social history and to interpret ideological characteristics and value functions. The generative path of practice theory is a thinking process that moves from concreteness to abstraction and from phenomenon to essence, leading to a general proposition with the theory of literary ideology as the core, and the interpretive path of the theory of literary ideology is a thinking process that rises from abstraction to concreteness and extends from understanding essence to interpreting phenomena in a bid to illustrate and explain a range of literary phenomena and practices, thus reflecting the dialectical unity of history and logic in Marxist intellectual methods.