On Ferenc Tőkei's trans-cultural interpretation of Wen Xin Diao Long

Abstract

This paper analyzes Ferenc Tőkei's trans-cultural interpretation of Wen Xin Diao Long (《文心雕龙, The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons) from the perspective of the ‘Variation Theory of Comparative Literature’. Ferenc Tőkei, an academician of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was an important Sinologist, Marxist philosopher and literary theorist. His interpretation of Wen Xin Diao Long has been noted by some Chinese scholars, but not investigated in detail. With the emergence of Variation Theory, the significance of Tőkei's interpretation is revealed. On the basis of György Lukács's aesthetics of genre and of the comparison between western and Chinese culture, Tőkei reveals his conceptualization of Liu Xie's theory of genre and raises it to the level of universal value in world literature. Tőkei's trans-cultural interpretation, one of the theories of genre of Marxist aesthetics in Eastern Europe, demonstrates the Variation Theory of Comparative Literature.