Abstract
One long-standing debate in Chinese literary criticism and hermeneutics has been over the meaning of "intent" (yi) in Mencius' notion of "tracing back intent through understanding (yiyi nizhi).The debate between the text-centred and the reader-centred is renown due to Qing scholar Wu Qi's (1615-75) positing his interpreting Mencius' "intent" as idea of antique scholars against what he understood to be Han-Song scholars' interpretation of it as personal opinion or conjecture opinion of ancient people. The Han-Song Confucian scholars understood Mencius' "intent" from the reader's perspective, as the intent of text-based reader. Scholars in the Ming and Qing dynasties referred to social contexts and broadened the way to understand the author, but this approached undermined the limitation of the original text and strengthened readers' subjectivity in interpretation. Following their Ming and Qing predecessors, contemporary scholars explore new possibilities of "intent" under the influence of Western hermeneutics, and attempt a decontextualized critique of Wu Qi's interpretation. In fact, due to readers' conscious involvement in the interpretive process, Wu Qi's understanding of "intent" is inevitably the intent reader-filtered text, which was inherently consistent with Han-Song scholars' intent of text-based reader. The intent may be interpreted from the perspective of the reader or the text, and Mencius' standpoint on this remains unknown. This paper argues that the integration of both perspectives is the true meaning of the intent in "tracing back intent through understanding".
First Page
80
Last Page
90
Recommended Citation
Huang, Hongqiu. 2020. "A Textual Critique on Mencius' Perception of "Tracing back Intent through Understanding"." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 40, (2): pp.80-90. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol40/iss2/3
