ABSTRACT
The relationship among perception, rationality and literary creation is an intricate theoretical problem in literary and art theories and also a controversial problem in literary and art practice. Some people hold the view that arts are perceptual and artists should follow their heart in artistic creation, and that the creation will be a failure once rationality gets involved. There may not be controversy about the idea that artistic creation cannot do without perceptions of creation subject, but there is much controversy about rationality's involvement in artistic creation, especially in the literary creation. Those who asserted nonrational viewpoints of arts have also quoted Marx's thesis about the difference in the way art grasps the world and the way theory grasps the world. At the eve of the Great Cultural Revolution, some theorists completely negated the existence of imaginal thinking, arguing that human thinking ascended from perceptual thinking to rational thinking, and so did scientific research and artistic creation.
