Study On Susan Sontag's Aesthetic Ideology Of "New Sensibility"

Susan Sontag is a fairly creative and influential cultural critic and prose writer in contemporary America. Since she had issued the essay "Against Interpretation" in the 1960s, she holds high the spirit of bold suspicion and free criticism and persists in using her own independent thoughts as a weapon to fight constantly. Towards such extreme rebellious theories and attitudes, people have always been mixed with no consensus. I believe that both her rebellious consciousness and cultural practice stem from her own sensitive feelings of the age's spirit atmosphere and unique experience. Generally speaking , the aesthetic ideology of "new sensibility", which appears throughout the entire process of her theory and fiction, is the core of her theory and criticism.This article attempts to explain the basic content of the concept of "new sensibility" in Susan Sontag's theory and criticism. Especially, I'll focus on it and examine carefully the value of her aesthetic ideology, and analyze the inspiration and significance of reconstructing the new pattern of China's current literature and art theory and criticism.This article considers that her aesthetic ideology of "new sensibility" is affected by Western Formalism, Existentialism, and etc. Based on the emerging cultural practice, she highlights the independent value of art and its form and advocates breaking with traditional cultural hierarchy; as a cultural "spokesman" of the times' spirit, she has a strong consciousness of cultural democracy, her aesthetic ideology of "new sensibility" fully demonstrates the essence of freedom of art in life. But in a sense, she overlooks the complicated relations among art, nature and history, which is something of a nihilism and individualism.Nevertheless, Sontag's attention to the emotion, special explanation to subjectivity of the art, fragmented narrative mode in theory text and its radical political implication will be of great significance for China to reconstruct the current new pattern of literary theory and criticism.