A Study Of Martin Amis's Novels From The Perspective Of Media Ecology

Martin Amis is one of the most eminent contemporary British novelists.He was awarded the Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel The Racheal Papers(1973).And his masterpiece,Money,A Suicide Note(1984)was listed in the 100 best novels by The Times.It satirizes the consumerism,mammonism,hedonism,bristling individualism and cultural vulgarity prevailing in the late capitalist society,which makes it a canon in the twentieth-century literary history.And he has been awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his memoir Experience(2001)and has been listed for the Booker Prize twice to date.Although he hasn't been awarded the Booker prize,he enjoys a high reputation among the readers all over the world.In his fiction,he integrates experimentalism smoothly into realism,using the stream of consciousness,black humour,magic realism in his realistic writing.Since the 1970 s the research on Martin Amis has been continually gaining momentum,the scholarship mainly falls into these categories: themes,writing techniques,intertextuality.His novels have diversified themes and styles.He writes about the serious themes such as media,consumerism,Holocaust,nuclear threat,climate change,terrorism,sex revolution,death and so on,in which his deep moral and human concern is clearly shown.And the media of communication and their impacts are the common theme shared by many of his novels.He is sensitive to the changes in media environments and corresponding political,economic,social,cultural and moral changes,on which he expresses his reflection and criticism in many novels.Some scholars have pointed out that his novels are about the excesses of a media-driven society.However,to date there is no systematic study on Martin Amis' s novels on media.The dissertation aims to explore Martin Amis' s novels on media from the perspective of media ecology.A detailed analysis is given to three of Martin Amis' s novels: Money: a Suicide Note(1984),London Fields(1989)and Lionel Asbo: State of England(2012).They share the common theme of media,which wants systematic exploration in academic breadth and depth.So it's feasible and significant for this dissertation to interpret them from the perspective of media ecology.Media ecology studies media as environments in three dimensions,i.e.,media as symbolic environments,media as sensorial environments and media as semantic environments.Particularly,it studies how media of communication affect human perception,feeling,understanding,and value;and how people's interaction with media facilitates or impedes their chances of survival.By combining close reading with cultural study,the dissertation employs media ecology,the cultural theories of British Cultural Studies and the Frankfurt School,the social theories of Bourdieu,Baudrillard,Debord,Featherstone and soon,to interpret the great impacts of media of communication on economy,politics and social culture in Martin Amis' s novels.In the economy,media create symbolic environments which promote consumerism;in the politics,media create sensorial environments which strengthen class ideology;in the social culture,media create semantic environments which influence moral change.The dissertation consists of five parts.The introduction includes literature review of Martin Amis scholarship both at home and abroad,the significance of the study,the scope of the subject,the approaches to the study,the main contents of the research and the innovation of the study.Chapter one to three are the body of this dissertation,exploring the impacts of media of communication on different aspects in each novel,which merges into a whole picture of media's profound impacts.The first chapter explores media as symbolic environments and their influence on consumption in Money: A Suicide Note.The mass media such as television and magazines create symbolic environments of consumer culture,inducing the characters to indoctrinate the values of consumerism.The protagonist John Self is the product of mass media and consumer culture at its worst.The media environment he lives in constructs his way of thinking and living,he is a director of commercials for cigarette,alcohol and junk food,and he is addicted to junk food,cigarette,alcohol and pornography,so he is an exploiter and exploited as well.He lives by the values of consumerism,lives for the present,constructs his identity by the consumption of objects and signs and finds the meaning of life in the acts of consumption.And body is used by the mass media to promote the products to keep healthy,beautiful and strong.Visual media establish the ideal of male and female body through a vast amount of images,arousing their anxiety over their body.And body is assigned cultural meaning as an indicator of social class,and therefore a healthy,beautiful,slim and young body is a sign of success.In order to have the ideal image of film stars,Self,Selina and Caduta self-monitor their body strictly.To articulate his social status as “new middle class”,Self makes strenuous efforts to maintain his body through consumption,does plastic surgery willingly to acquire his desired image.The visual media result in people's pre-occupation with appearance and negligence of spiritual life,leading to anti-intellectualism and anti-culture.Rather than liberating it,visual media put the human body under deeper oppression by aesthetic violence and technological transformation.As the primal carrier of beauty and sexual desire,the female body is omnipresent in the mass media and thus suffering great consumption.Self makes money with the female body,e.g.,he makes pornographic magazines,pornographic movies and TV commercials with female body as selling points.Mass media turn the femalebody into a commodity,reducing the value of female to the exchange-value of beauty and eroticism,thus,beauty becomes a religious imperative for women and the first standard to judge their value,so that Self adopts a looks-alone policy in hiring girls and auctioning actresses.Selina and Butch enjoy a higher exchange-value because of their bodily beauty.Through exposing the commodification of male and female body,Martin Amis criticizes capitalism.The combination of media and consumerism leads to alienated consumption,resulting in the alienation of interpersonal relationships between lovers,family members,friends,and bringing about a vulgar culture and universal insecurity.Martin Amis lays his hope of salvation on Martina,who stands for high culture,and her salvation of Self achieves partial success.The second chapter studies media as sensorial environments and their influence on class in London Fields.Different communication medium creates different sensorial environments,which has great impacts on the making of classes,the construction of class identity and ways of social mobility.The characters in London Fields sense the reality through different media,which results in their difference in information,taste and ways of thinking,making them different classes.While Keith senses the reality through television and tabloids which have a content bias for entertainment,and lack professional and political knowledge,thus widening Keith's “knowledge gap” with Guy,restricting him to the lower class.Guy knows the world through serious books,newspapers and personal experience,which enables him to access more in-depth knowledge at a faster speed,and thus secures his position in the upper class.Because “medium is the message”,the reading of printed material cultivates rational thinking.As a cool medium,television calls for no active participation.Being addicted to television,Keith loses the ability to think rationally and read deeply.And the sex and violence in the television shapes his taste for the vulgar,confining him to the lower class.Moreover,as tools for the capitalists to dominate the working class ideologically,the mass media make Keith(from the working class)waste his time and energy in entertainment and lose his subjectivity and the ability of negation and resistance,accept the domination of the capitalist class.Thus,the mass media strengthen class solidification.Besides,the mass media's derealized construction of Keith's class identity leads to the crisis of his self-identity and class anxiety.And mass media work as the judge of all fields,their excessive concern for the celebrities misleads the mass to realize social mobility by courting publicity unscrupulously,e.g.,the third-rate writer Samson Young tries to become a celebrity through exposure on the mass media,Analiese gets publicity through having sex with celebrities,and Keith wants to get fame by practicing darts.Martin Amis criticizes the pan-entertainment,depoliticization of themass media such as television and tabloids,which strengthens the distinction and solidification of class and inequality.The third chapter examines media as semantic environments and their impacts on morality in Lionel Asbo: State of England.In the novel,the tabloids such as the Diston Gazette,the Morning Lark,the Sun,TV and the Internet dominate people's spiritual life in Diston.They are filled with violence,sexually explicit contents and the private lives of the social luminaries.They produce a vast amount of garbage which pollutes the semantic environment,and create a cultural environment which breeds incest,sexual freedom and gang violence in Diston.And they turn many entertainers such as the “Lotto Lout” Lionel,the glamour model turned poet Threnody into public figures.Lionel Asbo shows anti-social behavior,anti-culture,anti-intellectualism,anti-morality and indifference to people,but he gets effortless success and admiration from the media and the mass,sets a morally bad example for people,leading to their moral ambiguity.Besides,Lionel and Grace are addicted to the virtual world constructed by mass media,which causes their self-exclusion and indifference to others,impedes them from forming healthy moral relationships with others in reality.The pollution of semantic environment breeds moral decrepitude and debased culture,which partially explains the decline of the British Empire.However,Martin Amis is not totally despaired over the situation;he thinks that the solution lies in the renaissance of traditional culture through education and the conservation of print literacy.And he expresses his idea as a social ameliorist by portraying the moral idol Des.Reading serious books and newspapers purifies his semantic environment and leads to his moral growth.At last,he rises from darkness and arrives at dawn.The dissertation concludes that Martin Amis reflects and criticizes the great impacts of media of communication on economy,politics and social culture in his novels.In the economy,media create symbolic environments which promote consumerism;in the politics,media create sensorial environments which strengthen class ideology;in the social culture,media create semantic environments which influence moral change.Martin Amis expresses his idea to counter the biases of the electronic media by conserving print literacy and serious culture.Media play such an important role in politics,economy and culture in the contemporary society that it's significant to make a study of Martin Amis' s media writing.Reading his novels helps us form a critical attitude toward different media and avoids becoming a “one-dimensional man”.