Abstract

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Title:: Value Neutrality and Writing of Literary History: Methodology of Hong Zicheng’s Contemporary Chinese Literary History

Keywords:: value neutrality; Hong Zicheng; Contemporary Chinese Literary History; methodology

Abstract:: When writing his Contemporary Chinese Literary History, Hong Zicheng tried to take a value neutrality position. What is controversial about his writing of the literary history is that in his effective exploration of how national ideology permeates every part of literature he successfully employed Foucault’s method of knowledge archaeology but at the same time he kept his distance from the deconstruction pursuits intrinsic to Foucault’s method. Due to their different understandings of reality and motivations for doing research, different scholars sometimes give conflicting interpretations and theorizations of such relationships as those between knowledge and power as well as between aesthetics and ideology. Hong Zicheng’s narration of literary history provides us space for further examining contemporary literature’s academic aspirations and boundaries.