Constructing General Poetics: Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature Based on Bakhtin’s Philosophy of Dialogism

In the face of the “exhaustion” of literary theory today, both domestic and global academes have shown increasing interests in the interdisciplinary studies of literature. Current research, however, is mostly limited to the study of the internal relationship of a single subject interface of literary research, the study of inter-text internal relations of literary research, interdisciplinary research on external relations, and cross-disciplinary literary research etc. Bakhtin's philosophy of dialogism derives from behavioral aesthetics that advocates an intersubjectivity of the “I and the Other,” which centers on “aesthetic events” in the context of art and life, art and responsibility, art and discourse genre, and art and culture. Bakhtin believes that art and life are fundamentally different, but response to dialogue(inter-subjective responsibility) bridges the two. Therefore, studies of literature and art should become an interdisciplinary platform to discard “material aesthetics” and explore the new meaning of “aesthetic event” simultaneously. Interdisciplinary studies of literature are precisely dynamic and comprehensive studies that combine “micro-dialogue” and “macro-dialogue,” synchronicity(the study of genre poetics) and historicity(the study of historical poetics), among which the investigation of the cultural boundary of artistic arena is tellingly suitable for the study of cultural poetics. So, the future construction of literary theory should be a systematic and holistic poetics that grasps artistic polyphony and “heteroglossia” (“bilingualism”), the layout and pattern of literary forms(genre-events), the evolution of literary forms(the history of genre development), and the examination of the cultural boundaries in literature and art. An interdisciplinary poetic study ought to integrate three dimensions of artistic and literary studies: theoretical(genre) poetics, historical poetics, and cultural poetics. From an interdisciplinary vision of the humanities studies, Bakhtin's theory of a construction of the poetic whole and his holistic research methodology have opened up the humanistic interdisciplinary channels of philosophy, aesthetics, literary and cultural studies, and constitute a significant theoretical revelation to the interdisciplinary study of art and literature.