In Confucius' time, poetry played a great role. "Poetry can flourish, view, group, hatred. Your father is a thing and your father is a distant thing. Learn more about the names of birds, animals and plants. " (The Analects of Confucius Yang Huo) "If you don't learn poetry, you have nothing to say." It not only plays an aesthetic role, but also has a strong function of imparting knowledge and political education. This is a reference book for studying natural history and diplomatic rhetoric. With the development of society and the close division of culture, the function of poetry is far from so extensive. For today's readers, the primary purpose of learning poetry is appreciation. Marx believes that products can only be finally realized in use, and appreciation is an indispensable link in literary and artistic works, including poetry. The role of appreciation, for its ups and downs, has three.
First, the function of aesthetic education includes cultivating aesthetic taste and improving aesthetic ability.
The cultivation of good sentiment depends largely on whether we can get rid of the entanglement of short-term practical utility. Appreciating literary and artistic works plays a subtle role in this respect. It is inconceivable that a person who is "resistant to dust and vulgarity" and can't even appreciate literary and artistic works in the minimum sense can achieve a good state of mind. Huang Tingjian has a famous saying that a scholar who doesn't study for three days "feels sick in front of the mirror and tasteless in front of people." (A Record of Dong Xuan) This is the reason. Poetry, a pure and implicit literature, plays a great role in cultivating temperament and promoting aesthetic education. "If a person doesn't like poetry, why is his interest in literature low? Because all pure literature should have the characteristics of poetry. A good novel or a good drama should be regarded as a poem. Poetry is more cautious, purer and more subtle than other kinds of literature. If you are not interested in poetry, you will eventually have some gaps in the beauty of novels, plays, essays and so on. Most people who don't like poetry but like novels and dramas can only see the shallowest part of novels and dramas, that is, stories. " "Poetry is the best medium to cultivate interest. People who can appreciate poetry can not only have a real understanding of other kinds of literature, but also never feel that life is a dry thing. " (Zhu Guangqian, "Talking about Reading Poetry and Cultivating Interest")
Lu Meipo's poem "Xue Mei" said:
Plum without snow without spirit, snow without poetry. The sunset poem is full of snow all day, and Mei is ten springs.
This is the most vivid portrayal of the happy function of poetry.
Aesthetics is an indispensable ability of modern talents. Literature appreciation needs this kind of appreciation even more. "The bosom friend is difficult! It is difficult to know the sound, and it is difficult to know the sound. " (Wen Xin Diao Long Yin Zhi) "For non-musical ears, the most beautiful music is meaningless. Music is not an object for it. " (Marxist Economics-Philosophical Manuscripts 1848) But this ability to understand friends, that is, the ability to appreciate, is not entirely innate, and largely depends on acquired learning, and the most effective learning method is the practice of aesthetic appreciation. Just as learning to swim can't rely solely on books, improving appreciation ability can't be effective only by reading some literary theories. Specific reading and appreciation is the only way. Therefore, poetry appreciation itself creates a subject with aesthetic perception and appreciation of poetry.
Second, it can provide useful reference for writing skills.
Engaged in literary and artistic creation, life foundation, ideological cultivation and writing skills are indispensable. And learning writing skills can't rely on any writing guidance. The effective way is to learn from typical works and classic writers. Han Yu "immersed? The premise of "being an article" is "gloomy and full of English" (Jin Xuejie). On Ci Yun in Kuang Zhouyi s HSBC Thorn;
Learn to write lyrics, learn to read words first. Cadence, I see. After a long time, my chest is full of enthusiasm, and naturally it is rich and harmonious.
The method of reading words, taking the excellent artistic conception of famous sentences of predecessors, constructs this artistic conception in my desire, then considers it clearly and expresses it in my own body. My nature and spirit are harmonious, which is true to me. I can't take away foreign things.
Song people should read more books and words and concentrate on their experience.
As a writing learning method, what I'm talking about here is not limited to lyrics. In the forty-eighth chapter of A Dream of Red Mansions ("Mu Ya Nv Ji Ya Ku Yin Shi"), Lin Daiyu taught Xiangling to learn modern poetry, saying, "Because you don't know poetry, you fell in love when you saw this shallowness; Once you enter this mode, you will never learn again. Listen to me. If you really want to learn, I have the Complete Works of King Shaman here. You should carefully consider his one hundred five-character laws, then read one hundred seven-character laws of Lao Du, and then read one or two hundred seven-character quatrains of Li Qinglian. With these three people in your belly, you should lay a good foundation first, and then look at Tao Yuanming, Ying, Liu, Xie, Ruan, Yu, Bao and others. You are such an extremely clever person that you don't need a year's effort to worry about becoming a poet. " Xiangling did so, and soon she wrote a poem and went on her way. Lu Xun also said that the works of great writers tell us how to write. Therefore, reading 300 Tang poems will not be out of date, and you will be able to recite them if you can't recite them.
Thirdly, poetry appreciation is an essential basic training for people engaged in aesthetic and literary research.
As mentioned above, the most developed and brilliant classical literature in China is expressive and lyrical poetry and prose. Therefore, many aestheticians believe that people who engage in aesthetics should first be familiar with the classical poems in China literature.
Appreciation is still an indispensable basic link in literary research, especially literary criticism. However, this does not seem to be without doubt. In 1930s, Zheng Zhenduo clearly defined the boundaries between appreciation and research in his article "New Methods of China Literature Research". He made a ridiculous description of ancient connoisseurs, critics and poetic writers, and said categorically:
There is a deep gap between appreciation and research.
Appreciators can say that the poem is good and the novel is poor at will, how beautiful this sentence is and how novel and appropriate the word is; Maybe the second appraiser will refute him completely. Researchers can't talk nonsense; He must go through strict investigation and study before he can draw a conclusion and have an opinion. For example, someone said that Qiu Chuji did the Journey to the West, so he took the test. Finally, he found that The Journey to the West in Qiu Chuji was The Journey to the West in Changchun, not a narrative about the Buddhist scriptures and the Great Sage's Journey to the West. So who shot this The Journey to the West? So he went a step further and found a lot of circumstantial evidence in a book, proving that The Journey to the West was made by Wu Cheng'en, so he went a step further and studied Wu Cheng'en's time, life, thoughts and works. So I came to the next conclusion: "This The Journey to the West was written by a man named Wu Cheng'en at some time." This conclusion has become a definitive conclusion. This is research!
In fact, Mr Sidi's so-called "textual research" at that time was very narrow, that is, it specifically referred to textual research, excluding literary criticism. As a literary research, textual research is only for laying the foundation stone, and its purpose is to provide accurate and credible materials for further research, such as literary criticism and literary history research. Appreciation is an essential intermediate link from textual research to criticism. In the meantime, there is no "deep ditch". Why are there "thinkers whose feelings have been frozen, that is, poets often make fallacious judgments and ridicule" (Lu Xun's Enemy of Poetry)? The fundamental reason is that he doesn't appreciate poetry, but treats poetry in a scientific way, which is equivalent to "a botanist", "a geologist" and "treating literature as a tree and a piece of ore as research data" (see Zheng Zhenduo). At the same time, appreciation is also an essential skill for literary researchers. Without this skill, it will even lead to the ridicule of "illiterate". "A symbol of value blindness is the lack of aesthetic feeling; I have no taste for literary and artistic works. This disease, according to the example of color blindness, can be called illiteracy. " "Exegetical phonology is the most useful and interesting knowledge, and the minds of scholars are probably relics of the Piaoxue period in the Qing Dynasty, so that they have little knowledge, or think that the study of literature is just words or other textual research. The bullying of scholar Park is terrible. St. Pei Wei said in the sixth volume of "The New Edition of Yueyao Papers" that if you learn a language, you can't appreciate literature, but specializing in philology is like courting a young lady, and you can only find a girl instead. Unfortunately, I hate that girl the most. As soon as you flatter her, she wants to surpass the good girl. How many girls don't want to learn Hua Xiren? " (Qian Zhongshu's interpretation of illiteracy)
Then, how does appreciation or appreciation become an intermediate link in literary research? The fundamental point is that although appreciation or appreciation has strong emotional factors, it is close to creation in this respect; At the same time, it does not rule out the combination of knowledge and action, which is close to criticism. So, what is the relationship between textual research, appreciation and criticism? In order to save words, here is an expert's words:
What is obtained by textual research is historical knowledge. Historical knowledge is helpful to appreciation, but not to appreciation itself. Understand first, then appreciate. Understanding is the preparation of appreciation, and appreciation is the maturity of understanding. ..... just understand that this historical knowledge is very important. For example, if you want to know Cao Zijian's Ode to Luo Shen, you can't help but know his relationship with Empress Zhen. To appreciate Tao Yuanming's poem Drinking, we have to test whether it is "leisurely seeing Nanshan" or "leisurely seeing Nanshan" in the original work.
Understanding and appreciation complement each other. If you don't understand, you will never appreciate it enough, so textual research is the basic kung fu. But just knowing without learning, just a historical effort, did not enter the field of literature and art. ..... Like a food chemistry expert, after systematically studying the origin, ingredients and cooking methods of a dish, he stood by and refused to get his hands on it. ..... I think the most important thing is to put food in your mouth, chew it and enjoy it. (Zhu Guangqian's "Talking about Beauty-The Thirteenth Letter to Youth")
We not only say "good", but also what is good, not only "bad", but also what is bad. Only in this way can it be called literary appreciation. (Appreciation of Ye Shengtao's Literary Works)
To some extent, appreciation is the first stage of criticism, and in the process of understanding, the degree of criticism is relatively shallow. When we look at a work of art, we must be good at criticizing it through appreciation. ..... an art lover should not just stay in appreciation, but should make further criticism, because only through criticism can we know the true face of art and have a correct evaluation of art. (What's the difference between criticism and appreciation? )
To sum up, textual research is the basis of understanding; Only on the basis of in-depth understanding can we further taste the works and enter appreciation; The next step is to judge "good" and "bad" and explore the reasons why it is so good and so bad, which enters criticism. Therefore, textual research-appreciation-criticism are actually three levels of literary and artistic research. Appreciation is an indispensable intermediate link.
Although appreciation and criticism are two different things, there is no obvious gap between them. It can even be said that appreciation without criticism is as incredible as criticism without appreciation. The word "appreciation" is widely used because it was invented here. The origin lies in Tao Yuanming's poems. The poem "Migration" says: "Appreciate strange writing and analyze doubts." About speaking, it is called "distinguishing the strange and dispelling the confusion" and "appreciating". It can be seen that "appreciation" and "analysis" are originally two things, namely, appreciation is appreciation, perceptual intuition is aesthetics, analysis is judgment, and rational analysis is speculation, but they can penetrate and blend with each other. Compared with the so-called appreciation and appreciation, the word "appreciation" seems to reveal the relationship between appreciation and criticism more profoundly, and can better show this essential feature of appreciation activities.