Literature Consumption In The Era Of Mass Culture Evolving Towards Media Convergence

Literary commodity consumption and literary aesthetic acceptance are two entangled historical attributes of literary consumption activities.Various literary productions,media technologies,and cultural contexts present these historical attributes in different states and form divergent attribute relations.As the historical function of this attribute status and attribute relation,literature consumption,with its participation in literature production activities in a broad sense,continually affects the historical circumstances of literature activities.Based on this,this thesis proposes to explore these two attributes of literary consumption and the relationship between the two attributes from the perspectives of the evolution of literary media and the reality and historical conditions of cultural context changes.Consequently,it has gained crucial theoretical value of the times.In the artistic production theory put forward by Marx in the 19^th century,literary consumption is based on literary production activities.Hence,based on the dialectical unity of the generality of production and the particularity of art in literary production activities,literacy consumption has obtained the duality of the dialectical unity of literary commodity consumption and aesthetic acceptance.The duality of literary consumption has also been confirmed and developed in concept criticism of“artistic creation”of the 20^th century Western Marxists and theoretical vision of the“literary field”of Pierre Bourdieu.Since media mediates the production and consumption of literature,the construction of literary media also influences the duality of literary consumption,which presents a practical aspect of historic transformation with the evolution of literary media.Therefore,to discuss literary consumption,the perspective that combines history and time should be adopted.The popularization of the print media and the entry into the modern stage of culture since the 15^th century are the premises of the phenomenon of contemporary literature consumption.In the 19^th century,with the prosperity of literature production and the accelerated development of print media,the construction of a relatively independent literature field presented the dual features of the opposite and unified dialectical unity of literature commodity consumption and literature aesthetic acceptance.In the 20^th century,the development of media technology fostered a mass culture with the characteristic of medialization and the nature of socialized production,meeting the demands of mass culture.As mass culture shows the attributes of developing in line with the trend of humanized media in its media characteristics,mass culture can also be expressed as“mass culture towards media fusion.”Different from the gradual development process of the West,Chinese mass culture developed rapidly with the modernization process in the late 20^th century,and entered a stage of comprehensive development with the popularization of electronic media in the1990s,and quickly evolved into the media integration stage in the new century with the prosperity of digital media.The literary consumption that flourished in this context also developed rapidly.At the entire development stage of mass culture in the 1990s,the electronic media,on which mass culture relies,squeezed the living space of print media and strengthened the commodity consumption elements and economic order in literary consumption.This development put forward an opposing situation of the duality of commodity consumption and aesthetic acceptance in literary consumption.And therefore,the issue of literary consumption with strengthened commodity consumption elements was highlighted and has entered into theoretical research.In the following new century,the popularization of digital media and the opening of media convergence driven by the media has pushed the mass culture to the stage of media convergence.In the meantime,a new digital sub-literature consumption has emerged from the traditional print media literature consumption,which gave birth to a complex situation in which the old and new trends of literary consumption in the new century coexist.On the one hand,the duality opposition in the electronic media stage of mass culture continues due to the traditional printed literature consumption.On the other hand,the new digital sub-literary consumption presented an integration trend of the duality of purchasing and reading tending to be synchronized due to the weakening of the material carrier.As a result,literary consumption in the new century has once again challenged the current research on literary consumption with its complex appearance of the interweaving of the old and the new and the coexistence of fusion and opposition of the duality.It is this difficult problem of interweaving the old and the new that requires this thesis endeavors to seek answers by historically grasping the process of mass culture from the“old”of the electronic media stage to the“new”of media convergence and capturing the process of mass culture moving towards media convergence.The dual differentiation of literary consumption in the new century affects the development of literature in the stage of mass cultural media integration.The differentiation of the two forms of literary consumption transforms the literary field into a composite structure consisting of a subfield of digital literature and an area of printed literature.The pan-media trend of literary consumption in the process of media fusion promotes the industrialization of literary production.The dual fusion of literary consumption in the subfield of digital literature leads to a digital revival of the literary communication function in the pre-print media stage.While constructing the dual differentiation of literary consumption and promoting the fission,industrialization development,and functional changes of literary filed in the new century,the mass culture with prominent mediation characteristics is also constantly reshaping the appearance of literary consumption through the taste of popular culture.The issue of the changes in mass cultural taste in literary consumption emerges.The two forms of literary consumption activities in printed and digitalized fields have shown consumption crisis problems such as the intensification of perceptual taste and the assimilation of daily taste of the mass culture.Its call for rationality and transcendence points the way of solution to literary morality,which has rationality and transcendence characteristics.Since the problem of intensified perceptual taste is the result of the continuation of the dual opposition of cultural consumption in the electronic media stage of mass culture in the 1990s,and the problem of the assimilation of daily taste is the product of the duality integration of literary consumption in the setting of mass cultural media convergence in the new century,the moral issues of literature consumption caused by the taste problem of mass culture at the stage of media convergence,such as irrationality and“kitsch”,under the reinforcement of the ideology of mass culture and the superimposed consumption ideology of the new century,are therefore represented in the moral orientation of the literature consumption in the era of mass culture evolving towards media convergence.To iron out these problems,we need to adopt historical and practical perspectives based on present China to construct new rationality and sensibility of literary consumption in the historical transformation and the actual context of media convergence of mass culture.