Eight Key Terms in Literary Criticism

I selected this topic for two reasons. The first is that public trust in literary criticism has dropped to zero since the 1990s. Recently, Paper of Literctture and Art ( Wenyi Bao) has been publishing many discus-sions of the current state of literary criticism in an attempt to save face for the critics and redeem some public trust in literary criticism. This loss of public trust is not entirely due to the nepotistic favoritism and kickbacks that shape literary criticism today. Corruption exists in all fields and occupations, and the literary world is, of course, no exception. Nor is the loss of trust due to the diversification of media forms and the emergence of critical factions. I think the fundamental internal problem of literary criticism is that the value system of critics is in disarray. Critics do not differentiate black from white; they simply parrot the words of others. Literary criticism in contemporary China still has not established a language of its own. I have given this some thought and will use the present chapter to offer a response to the issue. The second reason for selecting this topic is that, from the perspective of globalization, it is not at all unusual that these problems have risen in the contemporary Chinese literary circles. We all know that since the end of the Cold War, theories of the end of history and of postmodernism have flourished in the Chinese literary world. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.