Introspection On The Critic Theory Of Mass Culture ------Critic On Adorno's Mass Culture Theory

Introspection on the Critic Theory of Mass Culture ------Critic on Adorno's Mass Culture TheoryShan XiaoqiAbstract: Nowadays, people pay much attention to the roles and status of Mass Culture in the social development due to its overwhelming hinfluences in contemporary Chinese society. However, scholars in western countries have a deeper understanding than Chinese scholars because Mass culture occurred much earlier in the West . Therefore, most Chinese scholars cite from and refer to the western thoughts of scholars, represented by Adorno of Frankful School. As a result of their researches, they began to have a new understanding of the western theories, such as the change from completely accepting to cautionsly introspecting on Adorno's theory of Mass Culture. But generally, there are obvious insufficient in their researches on Adorno's theories. The author of this thesis tries to make a comprehensive study so as to deepen the introspecting by means of a comparative analysis with reference to many contrastive views to Adorno's.Apart from the introduction and conclusion, this thesis falls into four main parts. In the first part, the author talks about the origin of Mass Culture Adorno only emphasizes the single factor of commercialization. Lowenthal retorts Adorner's view and reveals that Adornor's consideration on this problem is insufficient. The origin of Mass Culture is historically rational in terms of transformation of social culture. The author contributes the origin of Mass Culture to many factors.In the second part, the authors retorts Adorno's view on social effects of Mass Culture. Adorno thinks the mass Manipulated and cheated by Mass Culture in his theory of " Culture Industry". Adorno neglect all effects of Mass Culture while Benjamin thinks the Mass is enlighted and emancipate by Mass Culture. They discuss further whether Mass Culture brings out democracy.In the third part, the insufficiency of Adorno's theory on the relationship between Mass Culture and Elegant Culture is discussed. The author analyzes the dispute that Mass Culture and Elegant Culture is totally opposite. Lowenthal treats this problem carefully and contradictorily , It is obvious that Adorno's view is partial and static because the relationship between them develops with history.In the fourth part , the author points out that the partiality and limitation is caused by his extraordinary experiences in view of the background of the social history. Fisk also discusses Adorno's partiality in the two aspects of "Mass" and "Text of Mass Culture", for example. Hence the author further retorts Adorno's view.The author 's contribution in this thesis lies in that he points out some insufficiency of Acorn's Mass Culture, theory in its basic propositions by a comparative study with some theorectively contrastive and provides a new orientation for the construction of Mass Culture theories in the future.