Consumer Culture Since The 1990s, Urban Novels

As a key word of the contemporary cultural discourse, consumer culture is gettingthe more and more important cultural background and theoretical way during theacademic fields.The relationship between consumer culture and the urban fiction has become theobject of much critical scrutiny and is fostering creative approaches acrosscontemporary literary. Bearing in mind the social, cultural, political, economic, andhistorical contexts involved, this paper aims to encourage a range of perspectivesabout urban fictions since 1990s in China.The goal is to examine the changes and characters in Chinese urban fictionsinfluenced by consumer culture and use them to develop new theoretical models thathelp us understand what the city means in the process of urbanism; whether it ispossible to conceive of the literary world in terms of the rules of contemporaryconsumptive culture; and how the literature not only merely reflects a city and insome way help to construct it.This dissertation includes five main sections.The first section traces the development of the city and its literary depictions incontemporary literature. Find the way people shape their identities, how theyexperience space and time, and how they locate themselves in relation to history andcultural traditions.Urban fiction is influenced by the contemporary cultural effects. The city,previously a foil for national authenticity, now serves to validate Chinese culturalessence, as the urban-rural dichotomy becomes reconfigured in an age ofglobalization. Both of private constructions of meaning and the public sphere, the cityis becoming more and more important, sometimes even becoming the only standardand symbol.In Chinese urban fiction since 1990s, subjective individual experience displacesnational allegories, as the literary imagination becomes dominated by cultural codesof the metropolis. City is the subject of a market society.The second section illustrates the relationship between fiction and city: not onlyurban fiction is influenced by the physical, social, and political aspects of the city, butthe material city is also a product of imaginative processes.City is the material places assembled from brick and steel and stone, inhabited by people of flesh'and blood—places, social, cultural, and physical fabric of cities are thedifferent forms.Both the city and the literature are textualized here: the literature is read in termsof urban modes, and the city in terms of literary modes is constructed. Urban spacesas texts and novels as repositories of information about the processes of urbanizationas well as the subjective experience of city life are the two equal ways to the corner ofurban fiction.The third section points out consumer culture changed many things of people,including daily life, social relations, living style, and so on. In literature it is reflectedin the development of the city through its commercial, industrial progress.The forth section generalizes the metropolitan essence: melancholic, decadence,desire, material of the marketplace in fiction.Desire is the symbol of consumerism culture—not only pursuing materialdesire and enjoyment, and chasing the delight of body desire is becoming a kind offashion, so desire narrative is the major style of literature text.The fifth section analyses the narrative strategy of urban fiction in consumercultural times. The functioning of capital and mass media controls each phase of theactivities of literature with financial benefits as its ultimate goal. So the solicitude ofinternal and external literary world is changing now, literature production must befollowed.The mode of literature production, literature values, the form ofexpression has changed according to the commercial principle, we should neitherabandon the aesthetic dimension of literature nor neglect the commodity dimensionof literature, in a all, independent creation, spiritual construction and aestheticappreciation is the last global of literature.So seeking and revealing the real conditions of the urban fictions since the 1990s,exploring its aesthetics and cultural meaning, we can find and try to explain and solvethe actual condition and problem in the fiction, maybe it is the possible way to the realinner world of literature.