Criticism Demands Cultural Imagination——Reflection on the Literary Criticism of Contempray Time

This essay presents and interprets the theoretical proposition that literary criticism demands cultural imagination from the relation between artistic imagination and cultural imagination, the relation between literary value measure and cultural imagination, the relation between literary criticism and cultural imagination and so on. It thinks that the cultural imagination is the social imagination that regards culture as resources in the globalization context, different from the general artistic imagination; In the literature of the present tense, the multiplicity of imagination and the ambiguity of value measure that engendered from it aspire after the meaningful literary criticism; Marxian criticism has always included the scientific cultural imagination. The contemporary literary criticism needs to go with the critical object. It not only should evaluate the cultural imagination in the literature, but also should criticize on the premise of the positive cultural imagination, and give people the ideal, the faith and the support of the metaphysics, thus not lose its duty of criticism.