Excerpted from Literary News Author: Yang Lu Leslie 6 1 Fidler (19 17-2003) is an American Jewish critic and writer, and he is undoubtedly one of the leading figures in early post-modern literary criticism. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, he was the first person to use "postmodernism" in literary criticism. Fidler, who is proficient in Japanese and Italian, has also toured the world and frequently appeared in the media, which can be regarded as the pioneer of similar style of today's big-name academic stars. He was born in a Jewish family, and his original name was Eliza Aaron, which is a typical Hebrew name. Because of her poor family, Leslie once sat in front of her father's bankrupt drugstore and cried that she had missed college entrance. Eventually, he paid his own tuition to enter new york University. This can also explain his left-wing complex all his life. While studying, he was keen on socialism and joined the "* * *" Youth League, especially fascinated by Trotsky's theory. Therefore, Fidler is an elite college out of the East Coast. Only at 1938 did I get a scholarship from the University of Wisconsin, where I completed my master's and doctoral studies. 194 1 year, Federer got a teaching position at the University of Montana. After Pearl Harbor, Fidler joined the navy and became a Japanese translator. It can be seen that Fidler belongs to a typical academic school, similar to umberto 6 1. However, Federer's best-selling works are his literary criticism rather than novels. He has written quite a few novels, which are far from being strongly echoed by his criticism. Fidler is famous for advocating pop culture myths in academic circles. Although he is eccentric at first, he is still an orthodox critic on the whole. After 1945 retired, Federer unexpectedly got a teaching position at Harvard University, teaching literature courses. Three years later, Federer published his first literary criticism article "Come Back to the Raft, Dear Huck", which was published in 1948 "Party Review" and caused an uproar at that time. Back on the raft, dear Huck made Fidler famous overnight at the age of 365,438+0. The first sentence of this long article is: "In an era when the exploration of responsibility and failure has once again become the primary consideration of our literature, blacks and homosexuals should become the universal theme of literature, otherwise they can be exempted." Blacks and homosexuals, in other words, race and gender, are two persistent key words in Fidler's literary criticism. What caused an uproar in this article was the theme of interracial male homosexuality it implied. That is to say, Huck and Jim in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huck Berg 6 1 Finn, a white man and a black man, * * * fled the civilized world of women and broke into the wild wilderness, showing the heart of brokenhearted between men of different races. And this knot is precisely the enduring and always concealed theme of American literature. Fidler said that if a society is full of fear and doubt about the "same-sex love" between whites and people of color, white American writers will inevitably restate the same anti-marriage myth. Not only The Adventures of Hakberg 6 1 Finn, but also other classic novels such as The Story of Leather Socks and Moby Dick. Federer's writings are rich, not only amazing critical words, but also novels. His critical works mainly include Jews in American novels and saying no! On Myth and Literature, A Guide to Seduction Literature, Waiting for the End: American Literary Scenes from Hemingway to Baldwin, Strangers Written by Shakespeare, Unintentional Epic: From Uncle Tom's Cabin to Roots, Freak: Myth and Image of Secret Self, Federer on the Roof, etc. Fidler also published novellas including The First Black Man in the West, The Last Jew in America and Naked Croquet Play. , but the response is average. From 65438 to 0965, Federer moved to the University of Buffalo, where he taught for life. However, the drug scandal of 1967 cast a shadow on Fidler's academic reputation. The police found a small amount of marijuana and illegal drugs in Fidler's residence, which made Fidler notorious. Fidler reviewed this experience in the book "Experience of Bankruptcy" published by 1970. Federer's masterpiece is love and death in American novels published in 1960. This book is regarded as a deconstruction of the traditional concept of American novels, showing how it originated from the established form of European novels and how it finally parted ways with them. In Federer's view, not only Huck and Jim written by Mark 6 1 Twain, but also American novels starting from fenimore 6 1 Cooper are full of the above-mentioned interracial theme of sleeve-breaking. For example, there is a footnote in chapter 1 1 of the book, in which Fidler discusses the first encounter between Ishmael, the narrator of Melville's Moby Dick, and his new black sailor Queequeg, who slept together in a smoky inn that night. Just like Back on the Raft, Dear Huck, Federer also flatly read the hint of interracial homosexuality from this narrative. This kind of suggestion may not be reliable today, but in the 1960s, it was definitely an overly sensitive topic. Moreover, in Love and Death in American Novels, Fidler also put forward a famous point: every American male classic writer, like any American man, is a child who doesn't grow up. In his words, "American novelists can't grow up healthily because they can't help but return to a narrow world of experience usually related to childhood and write the same book over and over again until they are silent or parody themselves." This means that American novels are immature. Because of immaturity, I dare not face adulthood; I am afraid of death because I am immature. At that time, this statement was regarded as a strange theory, and critics almost attacked it, but today, it has long been commonplace. As a rebellious critic of popular culture, Federer finally achieved satisfactory results. Saul Bellow praised him and called Leslie Federer the "best" guy in the history of American literature. Since the late 1970s, Federer has been focusing on mass cultural criticism. He spared no effort to recommend science fiction and invited popular science fiction writers to give lectures at the University of Buffalo. 1988 was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Literature. 1989 won Charles 6 1P6 1 Norton inspector's medal, the highest honor award of the University of Buffalo, and later won many literary awards. In 2003, Federer died in Buffalo. As far as critical methods or schools are concerned, Federer is famous for his mythical criticism. However, the myth he said has little to do with Jung and Frye's archetypal criticism. In his own words, he tried to find something unusual to impress him in the works of Dickens, fenimore 6 1 Cooper and Mrs. Stowe. These things can be called "myths" or "prototypes", but even so, the words are still not satisfactory. He clearly opposes the argument that literary criticism is to say "myth" rationally and objectively, and thinks that this will make criticism "logic" rather than "myth", which means that poetry submits to philosophy and art submits to science. In Federer's own words, "myth criticism" is a specialized science to solve mysteries. Just as "mysterious thinking" is not only a later translated "myth", but also a synonym for literature and all imaginative arts, this myth criticism is, in the final analysis, a strategy to turn myth into myth motif and rationalize irrationality. In other words, it devotes itself to transforming night into day, alchemy into chemistry, astrology into astronomy and the devil into psychology. What does it mean for American novels to crack myths and archetypes? What is Federer's literature? "An explanation is given. What is literature? Published in 1982, it can be said that it is a work of postmodern literary trend of thought. The subtitle of this book is "Class Culture and Nast Society". This is the same as19th century British critic Matthew 6 1 Arnold and 20th century British critic F.R. wrote Culture and Anarchy. Leavis's minority culture is exactly the same as mass civilization, showing the confrontation between elite culture and mass culture. The first definition of class is class, but it also refers to elegant class and taste, and the word classical has since come out. Elegant culture or class culture, in short, is the opposite of mass culture. It is true that the topic comes down in one continuous line, but the logic is completely different. For Arnold and Leavis, mass culture is called "anarchism" or "mass civilization", which is either a rabble culture or an American junk culture that is flooded with disasters. In short, we must exercise strict restraint and wait for the enlightenment of elegant culture. For Fidler, on the contrary, the title "Elegant Culture and Mass Society" is to show that brilliant classical literature has lost its beauty in today's mass society. The elitist standard of traditional criticism is no longer applicable to the literary phenomenon in today's mass culture era. Traditional elitist literary classics can open their doors and accept popular literature or popular literature that was once considered inferior. It is worth noting that what is literature? "(What is literature? The "yes" in the title is the past tense was. Is it that literature is a thing of the past, or that literature no longer exists, at least not the original literature? Federer claimed that he was half Freudian and half Marxist. As far as the first part of Subversion Standard is concerned, Fidler intends to show that the mass society subverts the classic culture all the time. The way of subversion is a typical Freudian route. In Federer's words, literature is like a dream, which tends to express what is suppressed. Therefore, in the patriarchal era, literature attaches great importance to maternal rights; In the Christian era, literature is advocating rights for the devil; In the era of advocating heterosexuality and small families, literature tells us to recognize that men hate women, and women in turn despise men. So the most common taboo is almost the most common literature. Fidler's literary criticism takes the mass line of mass culture, and he speaks very openly, so that his writing can be amazing, even if it offends the public. The popular culture in the 1980s was far less beautiful than it is today, and someone needs to take the lead. From this point of view, Leslie 6 1 Fidler can be regarded as the pioneer of internal disturbances in the academic school. Perhaps more enlightening, Fidler, an anomaly in contemporary American literary criticism, previews to some extent the inevitability of literary criticism advancing with the times under the frequent impact of cultural studies on literary studies today. In the "Open Classics" section, Fidler devoted himself to deconstructing or reinterpreting a series of black novels and their film and television by-products starting from Mrs. Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, including the later anti-Tom novels, such as Thomas 6 1 Dixon's trilogy "Golden Folk Songs" for the Klan, and Greaves' epoch-making adaptation of Dickson's novels. Then Mitchell's Gone with the Wind and the movie Gone with the Wind; Finally, there will be "anti-Tom novels", such as Roots and TV series adapted from novels. In Fidler's view, although it is the darling of the market, elite critics may not be optimistic, but this inadvertently brewed black epic deserves epic treatment. Based on the deconstruction consciousness of race and gender, Fidler was bitter about the way out arranged by Mrs Stowe for the liberated slaves. He noticed that Mrs. Stowe did not encourage them to be masters of the country in the United States, but expected them to emigrate again, return to their native land in Africa, spread the gospel wholeheartedly, and turn black Africa into a Christian paradise. From this point of view, the racial consciousness of Uncle Tom's Cabin is even different from that of the black nationalists who tried to "find their roots" in the second half of the 20th century. They don't hate the Christian culture that enslaves them at all, but are bent on finding a new world. On the contrary, they plan to spread the gospel of Christ to those compatriots who have not been saved on the black land and bring the "noble teachings of love and forgiveness" to Africa. In other words, former American slaves became cultural colonialists. Uncle Tom's Cabin has been controversial since its publication, mainly from the south. For example, the southern novelist William 6 1 Simms attacked the novel as nonsense, slander and crime. It is even pointed out that Mrs. Stowe herself has never been to the southern plantation, so it goes without saying that the details in her novels are extremely suspicious. In addition, according to the memory of Mrs. Stowe's son, Lincoln met Mrs. Stowe in 1862 and called her "the little woman who caused this war." But historians found that Mrs. Stowe did not mention this famous saying in her letter to her husband a few hours after meeting Lincoln. In addition, Mrs. Stowe also wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, which was largely inspired by the autobiography of Josiah, a black slave in a tobacco plantation in Maryland. Henson fled to Canada on 1830 and wrote his memoirs. Mrs. Stowe herself finally admitted that she benefited from Henson. Fidler's point of view is that it is incredible that this "paste work" of Mrs. Stowe can trigger a civil war. Say it is a "paste work", in addition to the above doubts, but also because of Mrs Stowe's words and sentences in Fidler's view is completely inadequate. The most mythical dramatic scenes in her works are usually the "worst" parts. But they are so touching that they not only exceed the standard of interests, but also make the truth irrelevant. Stylistic defects do not detract from the mysterious charm of this novel. On the other hand, Fidler realized that this "dream" novel certainly has political meaning everywhere, but like all dreams, in the world of light and sun, the result is not action, but only literature: Uncle Tom's Cabin is just such a work, which can help Americans in the north and the south understand the war they are involuntarily involved in from different angles, but it can't promote its arrival. What is literature? It is largely autobiographical. The author shows that literature is not divorced, but in fact literature cannot be separated from money and market. On the other hand, there is no contradiction between the criticism standard of academic elitism and the market consideration of literature. What is literature? Or, what was literature, what is it now, and what will it be in the future? I believe readers will make their own answers to the above questions.