Chapter Three

Guided Reading, Appreciation, and Criticism of Literary Works

Section One: Each Person Blows Their Own Horn

1. Each Playing a Different Tune

In Taiwan’s literary circles, new literary works appear every year as fresh contributors join the field. However, the activities of guided reading, appreciation, and criticism that introduce these works remain relatively weak. The main reason is that literary education in Taiwan’s university departments of literature has historically not emphasized this field. Instead, the focus has been placed on individual academic papers and promotion qualifications.

Taiwan does not have professional literary introducers or critics who specialize in presenting or reviewing literary works. Most are temporary part-time workers. As a result, introductions or critiques of literary works often become a situation in which “each person blows their own horn and plays their own tune,” relying solely on personal ability and becoming little more than “individual reading reflection reports.”

This article aims to clarify that under such an unfavorable environment, those meta-literary cultural creators who wish to engage in literary introduction or criticism as a form of part-time work should possess the proper understanding when undertaking such tasks.

2. Literary Criticism Is Not a Product Instruction Manual

Guided reading, appreciation, and criticism of literary works are different from the “instruction manuals” of commercial products. The former involves the spiritual and aesthetic activity of interpreting texts, whereas the latter guides users on how to correctly use a particular product.

However, many temporary reviewers who write poetry critiques often mix up “guided reading, appreciation, and criticism,” placing them all into the same pot and stir-frying them together. As a result, when such writing is presented to readers, what they see is merely a sticky mass of “verbal batter.” Readers often do not know where to begin. Even if they manage to read it to the end with difficulty, their interpretation of the literary work remains like “viewing flowers through a fog,” difficult to digest or absorb.

Section Two

Three Levels of Interpretation of Literary Works

The interpretation of literary works can be divided into three levels: guided reading, appreciation, and criticism. Each level has its own target readership, and the qualifications required as well as the depth of theoretical knowledge involved are also different.

1. Three Levels from Shallow to Deep

1. Guided Reading

The target audience of guided reading is the general readership. Its purpose is to guide readers in appreciating a piece of writing. Guided reading may briefly introduce the author and explain the background of the work’s creation. However, the primary focus must remain on guiding the appreciation of the work itself.

Through guided reading, readers should be able to understand the theme of the work and the main viewpoints expressed in the text. Using an aesthetic style of writing, the guide leads readers to feel the beauty of the language within the paragraphs and to experience the aesthetic perception that the author wishes to convey.

2. Appreciation

Appreciation involves analytical explanation of the text itself. Its audience consists of readers who are fans of or particularly interested in this type of work.

Such analytical explanations must help readers enter into the text and understand the expressive techniques employed within it, while also enabling them to appreciate the artistic imagery and rhetorical beauty contained in the work.

A critic who writes appreciation essays must possess fundamental knowledge of rhetorical theory. They must be able to correctly identify and analyze the expressive methods and formal designs used in the text, and clearly point out the aesthetic characteristics of the work.

3. Criticism

Criticism is the most advanced method of interpreting a text. Its audience consists of readers who already possess considerable reading experience.

The emphasis lies in analyzing and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of the work’s artistic imagery and expressive techniques, and even comparing it analytically with other works of the same type.

A critic who writes critical essays must undergo professional training in literary criticism. Such a critic must possess a broad vision of literary theory and practical competence in critical methodologies. According to the genre and subject matter of the literary work, the critic must select an appropriate critical methodology and conduct an evaluation of the text that is substantial in content, reasonable in argument, and supported by evidence.

2. Formal Conditions Required at Each Level

The author will now introduce these three levels of interpretation and the formal conditions required for each.

1. Guided Reading of a Work

Guided reading refers to the “guided reading introduction” conducted by an introducer with respect to a literary work.

The intended audience is the general reader. Its function is to allow these readers to form certain conceptual understandings of the literary work before actually reading it.

For example, consider the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. A guided reading article must briefly explain the novel, summarize its essential storyline, and outline the many issues and lines of thought it touches upon.

In a wealthy family, the male protagonist is a married playboy. Because he possesses great charm that attracts women, he moves through life with ease, simultaneously juggling relationships with his wife, his mistress, and numerous one-night stands. However, his mistress does not wish to continue indefinitely in this nameless relationship. She repeatedly expresses her desire for him to set a deadline for fulfilling his promises. Yet he continually responds with evasive gestures, maintaining a carefree attitude that seems indifferent and unconcerned. Only when the mistress resolutely leaves him does he realize that he had actually cared deeply about this relationship all along.

Providing such “conceptual understanding information” becomes a crucial factor in determining whether readers are willing to spend money to purchase the book and devote time to reading it. Therefore, the language of guided reading must be concise, and the vocabulary must be accessible and plain so that general readers can obtain these conceptual insights within a very short time and then decide whether to accept or reject the work.

In similar contrastive poems, for example in “Rainfall,” the contrast between the young and the old raises the question: should one go out to venture into the world, or should one return home? Xiangyang does not provide an answer. In “Fogfall,” the alternation between father and son appears: the father resembles a giant tree cut down by the resounding blows of an axe, gradually withdrawing from the scene, while he himself is “a small tree beginning to sprout,” which will ultimately grow. The use of contrast repeatedly appears throughout his poetry. “Rainfall” and “Fogfall” are both composed of two sections that entirely contrast with each other. Even in a recent poem, “Concept,” the middle line in each of the two sections reads respectively, “The same scenery, within different channels,” and “Different scenery, arising from different states of mind,” which still appear in contrastive sentence patterns. It can be said that from beginning to end, what Xiangyang subtly seeks to preserve is a certain essence of Chinese poetry.

(3) The Author’s Opinion

These two essays are both, in nature, works of appreciation. After reading them, readers will generally have two different kinds of “impressions.”

In terms of guiding the appreciation of the text and analyzing its expressive techniques, the former discussion wanders aimlessly. At one moment it quotes the postcolonial scholar Frantz Fanon, and at another it suddenly introduces Milan Kundera. This gives readers a very poor impression: the author seems fond of flaunting book knowledge and deliberately showing off scholarship. These sudden and scattered “extensive citations,” which appear halfway through the discussion, not only fail to add value to the interpretation of the poetic text, but instead lead readers astray onto the wrong path and blur the central focus of the discussion. This style of writing appreciation and criticism—rambling and digressive—is quite popular within academic circles and has even become a trend.

What readers want to know is what insights the writer has drawn from their own reading and understanding that can help readers enter the poetic text and comprehend its formal appearance as well as the aesthetic experience expressed in its content, rather than learning about the writer’s supposedly impressive scholarship.

The function of appreciation writing is to assist readers in directly entering the text. In this respect, Xiao Xiao’s appreciation remains consistently focused on the interpretation and analysis of the text. It not only explains the meaning and inner significance of the work—its emotional sentiments and aesthetic qualities—but also offers analysis from the perspective of external form, pointing out that the poem’s contrastive structure (the author’s note: parallelism between sections) is its principal feature.

Appreciation is a concept that stands at a higher and more concrete level than guided reading. When writing appreciation essays, the writer cannot simply summarize the work as in guided reading, condensing a story or merely expressing personal reading impressions. Instead, the writer must provide readers with useful analytical information that aids reading, such as explaining the genre of the text and the expressive techniques it employs.

Accordingly, those who wish to write appreciation essays must not only possess a level of textual appreciation ability superior to that of ordinary readers, but must also provide orderly and well-founded theoretical analysis. Moreover, such analysis must correspond to the interpretation of the text itself, rather than merely engaging in indiscriminate citations, piecing together references from various sources, and showing off one’s erudition.

3. Criticism of Works

Criticism of literary works involves adopting relatively rigorous critical methodologies when confronting a literary text and conducting an evaluative discussion of its literary value.

Many individuals who claim to be literary critics in fact lack the technical operational ability and scholarly cultivation required for evaluation and analysis. In the reviews commonly seen in the public sphere, some consist only of discussion without evaluation, degenerating into the exchange of ceremonial wreaths among acquaintances—a tool for social courtesy and mutual flattery. Others are even worse: their discussions lack any clear structure or traceable reasoning. No logical order or supporting evidence can be found, and they lack methodological theoretical grounding. Such writing resembles dreamlike self-talk or fence-sitting arguments that attempt to justify themselves without substance.

A competent critic must undergo rigorous training in literary theory and possess a conceptual understanding and mastery of both Eastern and Western schools of literary criticism and their theories. Then, when facing a literary work, after careful and thorough reading, the critic should be able to assess which appropriate literary critical theories should be adopted as the methodology, or objective theoretical basis, for discussing the text of that work.

The methodology for analyzing a text may be selected from two perspectives: internal textual study and external contextual study. The author believes that for shorter texts such as poetry, essays, and short stories, the focus should primarily be on internal textual analysis. For longer works such as novels and drama, one should first conduct internal textual study and then proceed to external contextual analysis.

Narrative structure, aesthetic viewpoints, rhetorical techniques, and grammatical rules are all objective theoretical principles for both textual creation and analysis. On the one hand, they help authors strengthen their linguistic expressive ability and deepen the aesthetic imagery of their texts. On the other hand, they assist readers in understanding what expressive techniques have been used in the work and what kinds of aesthetic imagery and rhetorical beauty are being presented.

(1) Modern Poetry Textual Criticism

In the discussion component of modern poetry criticism, in order to fully analyze and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the text, the critic may adopt the close reading method of New Criticism, conducting analysis and explanation line by line and sentence by sentence. During the explanation process:

1. The critic examines the poetic text according to the rules of syntax and semantics, identifying possible deficiencies in the lines, such as linguistic errors, grammatical mistakes, and incorrect parts of speech.
2. Rhetoric is used to examine the formal design and the methods of meaning expression (expressive techniques) employed in the text.
3. Then, according to the standards of hermeneutics, and following the various clues provided by the text, the critic explains the emotional sentiments and aesthetic experience conveyed by the text. Naturally, this part often involves fields such as aesthetics and psychology, and even sociology and philosophy.

In the evaluative portion, the critic may conduct diagnostic analysis and evaluation of linguistic errors, grammatical mistakes, and incorrect parts of speech existing in the text itself, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of its expressive techniques, and even aspects such as the selection of imagery and the construction of emotional sentiment. The critic may also propose constructive suggestions or recommendations for improvement.

Generally speaking, if the context is a literary competition, the critic occupies the role of judge. When facing numerous submitted works, the critic will, according to personal aesthetic standards and literary cultivation, conduct hierarchical evaluation among them, selecting works with relatively greater readability and allowing them to stand out, recommending them to the broader readership.

The critic may also compare the given text with works of similar style by the same poet. Alternatively, works of similar themes written by poets of the same era may be introduced for comparative analysis, evaluating the relative levels of expressive technique and aesthetic realm.

(2) Fiction Textual Criticism

In fiction textual criticism, for example, in Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, Conrad himself once described the work as:
“A story about a journalist who becomes the manager of a trading station in the African interior and even causes himself to be worshipped by a tribe of savages.”

Most of the discussions of this novel that the author has encountered tend to focus on external contextual research of the novel. That is, they emphasize the economic plunder carried out by European whites on the “Dark Continent” during the era of colonialism, as well as the policies concerning enslaved Africans revealed by the novel. Such analyses often adopt the perspective of Postcolonial discourse to interpret the text, frequently applying passages from the works of Frantz Fanon or Edward Said, thereby forming a style of criticism that indulges in excessive displays of scholarly quotation.

In fact, what most readers expect from a novel critique is a focus on the text of the novel itself. On the one hand, narrative theory should be employed to analyze the storyline of the novel and to understand the narrative main thread, the subplots, and the progression of the story as a whole:
opening → development → turning point → conflict → climax → conclusion.

On the other hand, psychoanalytic interpretation may be used to analyze the psychological transitions and emotional fluctuations experienced by the male and female protagonists as well as the supporting characters throughout the story, thereby assisting readers in understanding the inner worlds of the protagonists.

Section Three: Current Problems in Popular Criticism — Impressionistic Criticism and Quotation-Based Criticism

In contemporary Taiwanese literary criticism, besides the popular impressionistic criticism commonly seen in public literary circles, academic institutions tend to favor quotation-based criticism. When facing literary works, critics often indiscriminately cite numerous sources, bringing out various famous sayings or “discursive viewpoints” of Western literary critics. On the one hand, this displays—or shows off—their own erudition; on the other hand, it establishes authority by leaning on Western scholarship, making experienced readers hesitant to raise doubts or objections rashly. The shortcomings of these two forms of “popular criticism” are as follows: the former is self-absorbed, subjective, and superficial, while the latter merely repeats others’ ideas and lacks theoretical independence.

When evaluating the poetic quality and expressive techniques of modern poetry, the principles of rhetoric and grammar are sufficient. When analyzing the artistic imagery of a work, the relevant principles of aesthetics, semantics, and hermeneutics are sufficient. Randomly quoting the discourse of famous figures easily leads to digressions and blurs the original focus of the discussion, leaving readers increasingly confused the more they read. As for the philosophical implications embedded within modern poetic texts, this aspect belongs to the discussion of artistic imagery, style, or spiritual meaning. It is precisely an area where different individuals speak differently and offer their own interpretations. Ten critics will produce ten different explanations, and it is difficult to expect any definitive conclusion. This is precisely the aspect of poetic imagery that impressionistic critics most enjoy displaying.

Many domestic critics—some pretentious and others only half-competent—who write modern poetry criticism using impressionistic or quotation-based approaches often deliberately quote or apply fragments of famous remarks in order to support their own arguments or to display their supposed learning. They turn their criticism into something mystical and theatrical, making it appear serious and authoritative. However, such famous quotations are usually of little help in interpreting the text of the work. What readers truly want to understand is where the aesthetic value of the work lies and through what expressive techniques it is conveyed, rather than reading a pile of famous quotations excerpted by the critic. If the latter occurs, it actually deviates from understanding the text itself, which is precisely what the author calls “blurring the focus.” The thorough discussion of the text and the analysis of its sentences and passages should be the true focus of poetry criticism. Various digressive quotations and discussions merely lead readers into a maze, causing them to collide repeatedly with dead ends and become increasingly confused the more they read.