Borrowing, integration, creation: The localization of western literary criticism and the construction of Chinese literary criticism: An interview with Professor Hu Yamin

Professor Hu Yamin is a Chinese well-known scholar in literary theories and criticism, director of the College of Literature of Central China Normal University, Ph. D. Supervisor, vice president of Narratology Branch of Chinese and Foreign Literary Theory Academic Association, a member on the Advisory Board for Literature Teaching of the Ministry of Education of China. She has been engaged in the teaching and research of literay theory, criticism, comparative literature for a long time. Professor Hu always pays attention to the construction of Chinese literary criticism. She has made valuable explorations of the localization of Western literary criticism. Recently, Li Dingqing, a stringer of our journal, had an interview with her on the relevant issues. Since 1980s, Prof. Hu has experienced an academic career from literary translation to the study of narratology, to literary criticism, to comparative literary studies, and to Western Marxist Criticism. She believes that academic studies should be done with international and modem awareness. She proposes that Chinese scholars borrow and adapt Western literary theories according to the pratical needs of the present reality. They should also combine Western theories with Chinese theories. What's more, such construction should not be carried out generally, but with a focus on particular writers or theorists. Prof. Hu herself takes Frederic Jameson, the representutive New Marxist critic and Post-Modernist theorist, as the subject of her study. Her study has gone through the stages of meeting, comprehension, dialogue and criticism, and has established a valuable mode for literary criticism in China. The theories she has put forward-ideological narrative and cultural-formal criticism-are the fruitful results of her creative studies by the reorganization and merger of Eastern and Western literary criticisms. Prof. Hu holds that adapted Western literary criticism will make up a part of Chinese modem consciousness and at length a part of Chinese culture, for human culture has always developed through sublation and assimilation.