About Non-fiction Writing: The Growth Possibility of Critical Poetics

In the 1990s, faced with the crisis of the humanistic spirit and the inward tendency of literary theory under the background of market economy, cultural poetics fell into the dilemma of reality intervention under the framework of “aesthetic center theory”. In order to break through this limitation, academic circles have put forward the theoretical concept of “critical poetics”. By integrating the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, Zhao Yong advocates the establishment of a “two-winged” research path between “aesthetic analysis” and “ideology criticism” in order to cure the “insufficiency of intervention” in cultural poetics. Sun Shicong proposed “returning to Adorno”, emphasizing that through historicization and institutional analysis, the critical edge should be directed at the power network that shapes artistic production, injecting critical poetics with problem awareness and methodological vitality to deal with China’s reality. The vigorous practice of contemporary non-fiction writing provides a solid textual carrier and realization path for the concept of critical poetics. It takes interventionist gestures as its core, responds to the call for “intervention in reality” through the “physical presence” of the writer, and practices “historical and institutional analysis” through solid field work. Through the in-depth description of marginal experiences and the connection with critical theory, non-fiction writing elevates individual dilemmas to structural criticism and explores the ethical possibility of “reconnection” in “collaborative writing”. It has thus become the realistic fulcrum of the critical poetics conceived by Zhao Yong and Sun Shicong. It not only embodies critical theory in Chinese experience, but also provides an operational practical paradigm for theory to intervene in reality.