On The Modern Enlightenment Of Adorno's Negative Aesthetics And Its Significance For Literary Creation

Frankfurt School, an important branch of Western Marxism, takes"Critical Theory"as the guiding thinking. As the key person of the school, Adorno spent his whole life fighting against the unfreedom situation of people with the theories of philosophy and aesthetics. His entire life was incessantly devoted to Negation which is permeated from beginning to end, from negative dialectics to enlightenment dialectics, from"anti-debugging"music theory to Aesthetics. His master's wisdom is influential in culture field even in modern China without being worn away by the time. Therefore, the study on contemporary meditation of Adorno's aesthetic thoughts has been of great academic value and contemporary significance.The thesis consists of five parts. The first part focuses on art's negation on reality. Starting with his non-identity thinking, it treats of the negative dialectics between people and society, reality and art so as to clarify the social critical function of art. The second part affirms that art's negation on society is limited. It probes into birth and development of aesthetics from the perspective of history. The third part sets forth the crisis and rationality of negative aesthetics as well as historical rules connecting limited negation, and find out the reasonable crisis and life force in the modern or post-modern social context. The fourth part illustrates utopian dimensions of negative aesthetics and reveals the support point of Adorno's thoughts, i.e. the inner force to transcend the limitation of contemporary and pursue the truth of happiness. The last part discusses the crisis of literary creation in contemporary China, which is attributed to the absence of courage of negation and spirit of transcendence.