Interventions And Responses

When we review the 1990s literary writings from different perspectives, different ideas come up. However, nobody will deny the eye-catching position of mass culture in the literary context of the 1990s. In this context, with the dominant of mass culture arising in market economy in the production and consumption of cultural works, literature had no other choice but to be marginalized in the competition with mass culture for ideological field. And as a result, market factor forcefully intruded into literature territory. In such a situation, under the drive of economic interests and desire for notability, some authors readily accept the interventions of market and mass culture. They exerted their efforts to cater for low taste of the mass and commercial demands, gave up dignity and fame of literature and threw away their responsibilities and rights as intellectuals. On the way to market, their works moved out of the field of literature. While some other authors were resolute to fight a sacred war against mass culture so as to safeguard the divinity of literary discourse as they condemned mass culture to be chief criminal of humans and people's degradation. Driven by such lofty and extreme mood, they resisted mass culture and gradually pushed themselves and their living space of writings to dangerous edge. In the author's opinion of this thesis, both unprincipled identification and complete denial are not advisable. The development of mass culture and market economy are unchangeable tides in China in the 1990s. We should treat their interventions dialectically and make responses to them without losing dignity of literature. In this thesis, the author attempts to analyze their response manners to the interventions of mass culture and market, to sort out other possible response manner apart from above-mentioned two by means of analyzing cultural theory, context of mass culture and sampling in the 1990s literary writings. That possible manneris to make full use of law of value as a double-edged sword in the market, to utilize propagandas on mass media, to accept commercial jingling words, to take in and modify popular manner of narration and aesthetic imagery. And also, it is to express intellectuals' independent thinking in popular and idiomatic language in order to find the agreement between critical attitude and sensibility of intellectuals and the accepting manner of mass culture so that intellectuals could response easily to the intervention, of market into literature.