Literary Text In A Consumer Society--The Turn Of Literary Textual Form

The prevailing of the global consumer society and the culture-ideology of consumerism has brought out the western society essential transformation. Although all the criticism around the consumer society, the culture-ideology of consumerism and postmodernism is virtually based on the various theories on social justice, the significance of the historic transformation in the sense of social justice has not been revealed. As a result, discussion without necessary theoretical prerequisites is fallible and confusing.This dissertation, after tracing back to some principal fallacies on thepries of social justice, is to elucidate the value system on which theories of justice in consumer society are based by demonstrating that the consumer society is an inevitable logic result of the development of modernity.In this dissertation, the basic values such as freedom, democracy and equality, as the most important axiological basis of modernity, and the theoretical prerequisites to the criticism against consumer society, are the primary supposition to be examined. The candidate locates the fundamental values, freedom, democracy, and equality, which seemed to be conflicting in western tradition, on the basis of general citizenhood. In this sense, all the fundamental values mentioned above are the form of general citizenhood. In this way, the disputes on those fundamental values could be settled; furthermore, the logic of the social structure of consumer society as well as the culture-ideology of consumerism could be regarded as indisputably legitimate.The structural logic of consumer society is, essentially, the market democratic system. This system iciates to the historic development of monetary credit in the modern times. The establishment of monetary credit symbolizes the establishment of civil society consisting of money holders. On the one hand, the power of state toissue bank notes is authorized by the civil society through general social contract, which makes the state power authentic public power. On the other hand, citizens as money holders are endowed with infrangible rights in transactions. Market democratic system based on this principle has put the right of public election to the hands of each money holder, using the bank notes as the votes. Therefore, producers become consumers, and this coincides with and is guaranteed by the universal suffrage and the social welfare system.As for consumer society as well as the culture-ideology of consumerism, although having been severely criticized since the adventure of consumer society, in the theories of Georg Simmel and the influential Frankfurt School, the legitimacy is unshakable. On the contrary, it is the criticism from the standpoint of elitism in the times of pre-consumer society, neglecting of the legitimacy of consumer society, which is dubitable. The candidate, in response to some representative fallacies, re-analyzes such postmodernist problems such as the condition of postmodern!ty, the consumption of symbols and images, the vanishment of the division between life and art, and the relationship between high culture and popular culture.According to the achievements of anthropology and the materials attained from field study, as well as the progress in the field of political philosophy, this dissertation also elucidates that human culture is a system of symbols created by various social groups. As for the relationship between words and objects, actually, both words and objects are languages in different levels. Everything in human's worldview, objects in the world of culture, social systems, languages, tools, utensils, behaviors, are all symbols or languages. From this linguistic supposition of cultural semiotics, it is clear that the structural logic of consumer society would certainly lead to an unprecedented linguistic liberation of the symbol system including objects and behaviors appeared in pre-consumer society. It is the liberation that sets the linguistic foundation of the transformation of literary texts in a consumer society.Based on the...