Literary Narration In The Context Of Consumptive Culture

With the gradual establishment of market economy, the acceleration of urbanization and the rising of contemporary media ever since the 1990s, a great change has taken place in China's social and cultural context, the rising of post-modern consumptive culture just marks this major turn. In the context of consumptive culture, due to prominence of the commercial principle, there have been profound changes in modes of literary production, dissemination and reading as well: on the one hand, literature is marginalized in a new social and cultural order; on the other hand, literature itself is forced or drawn helplessly into cultural production system under the commercial principle and has gradually been turned into a complex social and cultural activity from its comparatively independent behaviors of artistic creation, spiritual construction and aesthetic appreciation. Regarding the above, based upon consumptive culture and post-modern theories, the paper expounds the roles of "media field" and the impacts of China's consumptive culture on literature, makes a detailed approach about the relationship between symbol production and fashionable trend of literature in a consumptive society and focuses on three major features of fashionable trend: materialization of expression of aesthetic feeling, non-moralized personal narration and extreme imagination in recounting of human nature. The article further examines a notable change in modes of artistic expression of novels: tendency of a shift from time to space. At the same time, as a background of the change in aesthetic paradigm of literature, it probes into the pressure of the rising of new media and visual culture on literature. In the end, as the paper points out, to examine literary narration in the context of consumptive culture, we should neither abandon the aesthetic dimension of literature nor neglect the commodity dimension of literature regarded as a sort of cultural consumption goods, but should grasp the present situation and the future of literature in the field of vision of both absorbing and surpassing elites and masses.