Chinese Journal of Literary Criticism

No.3, 2024

The Category of “Xushi” and Its Multi-Directional Representation in a Comparative Perspective

(Abstract)

Chen Lili

The dichotomy of “xushi” (the real and the imaginary) has profoundly influenced aesthetic history in both Chinese and Western cultures. In Chinese tradition, the aesthetic connotation of “xushi” is highly diffractive, permeating aspects such as content, technique, and stylistic conception, resulting in three aesthetic orientations: realism, the imaginary, and the symbiosis between the reality and the imagined. In Western aesthetics, the concept of “the real and the imaginary” is intimately connected with theories of mimesis, phenomenology, existentialism, and fictionality and others.