The original meaning of poetics:
Emile Stagel said in "Basic Concepts of Poetics": "The word' poetik' comes from Greek and is a simplification of the word poi tike téchne." "'poetics' ... is dedicated to proving how the essential strength of human beings appears in the field of poet creation."
The name "Poetik" means a practical course, which should enable unskilled people to learn to write poems (Gedicht), long narrative poems (Epos) and drama. Modern works published in the name of poetics are the same as ancient works in this respect, that is, they all think that the essence of lyric, narrative and dramatic style lies in specific examples of poetry, narrative poems and drama.
Valerie said in The Art of Poetry: "According to etymology, poetics refers to all works or creations with language as the entity and means, rather than narrow aesthetic principles and rules about poetry."
Here, the western concept of poetics is not only a theory about poetry from the beginning, but also a concept about all literary styles. According to Valery's understanding, the scope of poetics is wider. Stagel divided poetics into theories to study the writing skills of poems, narrative poems and dramas, which was clearly determined according to the genre classification of ancient Greece.
Evolution of poetics:
The word poetics comes from Greece, and the earliest and most authoritative work is Aristotle's Poetics. The "poetics" in Aristotle's Poetics is a subject in the same position as ethics, rhetoric and metaphysics. Mainly study the general theoretical problems of literature. For example, what is literature, its constituent elements, its means and purposes, the similarities and differences between literature and other arts, and the relationship between literature and reality. Although the author did not directly discuss these issues, he achieved the purpose of discussing the general theory of literature through the study of Greek tragedies. In Poetics, Aristotle not only discusses the types, functions and nature of poetry, but also discusses other artistic theories and theories such as tragedy and imitation. In fact, Aristotle used "poetry" in the general sense, that is, poetry is art. When discussing the structure, content and influence of tragedy and epic, he especially pointed out that poetry should be a re-creation or imitation of human life and behavior. A basic idea that runs through the whole poetics is that poetry is closer to philosophy and more serious than history. In the sixth chapter of Poetics, he discussed the main points of his poetic theory and aesthetic theory.
Aristotle's Poetics is not only a pioneering work of western historiography, but also a direction of western poetics research in the future. Since then, the theoretical works of western classical literature used to use the title of "poetics". For example, the most important literary theory work in Rome is Horace's Collection of Poetry. In the Middle Ages, Aristotle's poetics was submerged. The poetics at that time had little to do with Aristotle's poetics. During the Renaissance, a large number of literary theory monographs named Poetics were produced. Until the 7th century, the French classical theorist boileau wrote The Art of Poetry. These works are not simple works of poetic theory, but general works of literary theory. Classical theorists mostly create poetics in order to make laws and regulations for creation, which limits the writer's creative freedom to some extent. Under the impact of romanticism, classical poetics began to lose its reputation. Since then, so many works like Poetics have not been published. At least they have no authority.
The following poetic theories are mainly aesthetics from Baumgarden and literary criticism from Blanckenburg. By the19th century, poetics had evolved into two parts: philosophical aesthetics and literary criticism using historical methods. The former is a poetic theory established by transcendental aesthetic system, which tends to strengthen the theoretical color of poetics to replace the law. Its main tasks are Baumgarden, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Croce and others. The latter deals with poetics from the viewpoint of historicism, which is called literary theory.
In the 20th century, it gradually became a foregone conclusion that poetics was used to refer to general literary theory in western literary theory. This first stems from the redefinition of the purpose and object of poetics by Russian formalism theorists. . Formalist theorists believe that the main purpose of poetics is to answer what makes language materials become works of art, that is, what makes literature become literature.
In the 20th century, the post-impressionist poetry theory tends to return to the traditional concept of poetry, such as Eliot and Pound. Other contemporary poetic concepts are based on theories of linguistics, sociology, anthropology or psychology, such as structuralist poetics. Poetics sometimes interacts with literary theory. Wellek suggested replacing "poetics" with literary theory in "Poetics", but now critics often use this term to emphasize the nature of "internal research".
After the Second World War, new criticism, structuralism, psychoanalysis, archetypal criticism, semiotics and other theoretical thoughts appeared one after another, which became the main body of modern western poetics and paid more attention to the analysis of the internal language characteristics and deep structure of literature. Modern poetics is also different from traditional poetics. Modern historiography's answer to the core question of what literature is is completely different from traditional poetics. But they all use the concept of poetics at the level of general literary theory.
At present, the extension of the concept of poetry is still expanding. In the works of some scholars, poetics has become synonymous with theory. For example, Linda Hutchin, a Canadian scholar, calls her post-modernism works post-modernism poetics, and the meaning of the poetic concept she uses here is theoretical expression. In addition, The Selected Poems by harold bloom, an American theorist, was also rated as "Poetics of Influence" by the editors. Willis Barnes's History of Translation and crossman Weimar's Poetics of Reading have also appeared. Richard & #183; Halpern's primitive accumulation poetics.
The definition of modern poetics:
Tomashevsky said in The Definition of Poetics: "The task of poetics is to study the structure of literary works. Literature with artistic value is the object of poetic research. The research method is to describe, classify and explain the phenomenon. " "The study of the structure of non-artistic works is called rhetoric; The discipline that studies the structure of works of art is called poetics. "
Shklovsky said: "The establishment of scientific poetics should start with the existence of prose and poetic languages based on a large number of facts (the two languages have different paths), and the analysis of these differences should be the beginning." (poetics)
Zhirmunski divided poetics into theoretical poetics and historical poetics. "The task of theoretical poetics is to explain the artistic significance of these poetic techniques, their interrelationships and their basic aesthetic functions. As for historical poetics, it should clarify the origin of various poetic techniques in the style of poetry times and clarify their relationship with different periods in the history of poetry development. " (The Task of Poetics)
Todorov said: "Poetics is contrary to the interpretation of personal works. Its purpose is not to reveal the meaning of a work, but to determine the general laws on which each work depends. It is different from psychology, sociology and so on, and it is devoted to exploring these laws from within literature. Therefore, poetics is a subject to understand and grasp literature from both abstract and internal aspects. The research object of poetics is not the literary works themselves, but the attributes of a special language-literary discourse. Therefore, any work is regarded as the display of an abstract structure and the embodiment of a possibility of this structure in the concrete communication process. Therefore, this subject is not concerned with real literature, but with possible literature. In other words, it focuses on the abstraction of literature, namely literariness. " (structuralist poetics)
Todorov and duclos Mette said in their "Poetics" entry in the Encyclopedia of Language Science: "The first question that poetics should answer is: What is literature? ..... In other words, it should try to lead the social phenomenon of "literature" to an internal theoretical entity; Or it should define literary discourse by comparing with other discourses, so it needs to give itself a cognitive object, that is, the product of theoretical research; It starts from the observed facts and keeps a certain distance from them. " "Secondly, poetics should provide tools to describe literary works: distinguish different levels of meaning, determine the units that make up the works, and describe the relationship between the participating units. With these basic classifications, people may study some relatively stable forms. In other words, the study of types and genres also involves the study of inheritance laws, that is, the history of literature. "
"According to the traditional concept, the word poetics first refers to the theory involving literature; Secondly, it also refers to a writer's choice and application of literary laws (theme, conception, style, etc.). ), such as' Hugo's poetics'; Finally, it refers to the proposition put forward by a literary school and all the laws that the school must follow. " "In the West, people are used to taking ancient Greece as the origin of poetics. In fact, at the same time, even earlier, this kind of thinking about literature has begun in China and India. "
According to Khrushchevsky, an Israeli critic, poetics means "studying literature as a literary system". It should solve the problem of' what is literature' and all other possible problems caused by this problem, such as: what is the art of language? What are the forms and types of literature? What is the essence of a literary school or literary trend of thought? What is the "art" or "language" system of a particular poet? How is the story made up? What are the specific aspects of literary works? How are these aspects constituted? How to express' non-literary phenomena' in the text of literary works. "
In a word, poetics is a conventional traditional concept, and its content is very rich, including both poetic theory, general literary theory and even aesthetic theory.