From The Elite To The Masses

People usually have a prejudice while describing the twentieth century literature, they only emphasize the succession of modernistic literature and post-modernistic literature, and neglect popular culture and popular literature. Hoping to survey the twentieth century literature renewedly in the view of spiritual and cultural succession, the thesis puts modernistic literature, post-modernistic literature and network literature in the same dimension to study the successive relationship between the three.It's no doubt that modernistic literature which emerged early in the twentieth century was the first deep thought on modern people's living condition from the western literary circles at that time. To reflect western actuality and western person 's spirit crisis, the new literature must carry out on the premise that the traditional concepts of value disintegrated and the traditional literature couldn't express Mankind's new predicament. This point also determined that as soon as it emerged, modernistic literature must make a strong anti-tradition gesture to create its new literary concepts and styles. But here is just the question: when the western cultural elites cared for man's destiny totally, that's to say, when they took hold of man's destiny by all kinds of new methods, by its "abstraction" that people couldn't understand, they actually turned themselves into the elites breaking away from the public. Thus, those people who hankered after all sorts of new tests actually changed literature into a kind of article, which was only viewed and admired within a circle of cultural elites. And literature activity also became a kind of "noble" behavior.Despite of many reasons for the emergence of post-modernistic literature, an undeniable fact is that it's to refute the essential literary mental and the essential cultural group. The new character and proposition of post-modernistic literature were to emphasize literary anti-logocentrism. This gave the essential mental of modernistic literature a mortal beat. Jacques Derrida was a famous theorist of Deconstruction. The essential point of his deconstructive tactics was to admit the "differance" trait and "dissemination" nature of meaning. By means of his deconstructive tactics post-modernistic literature destroyed modernists' essential mental and the noble trait of literary concept. Thereby, in spiritual and cultural implication, literature began to be in step with the requirement of popular culture.Popular culture essentially is a special reflection of democracy consciousness on the culture. To say in a special sense, the large-scale emergence of popular culture indicated the public's democracy consciousness widely increased and enhanced. It also indicated the public's basic mindset to equally enjoy the products of man's culture began to prosper. This reality spurred essential culture and essential literature on to disintegrates. With the development of science and technology, the requirement of cultural democratization got great technological support atthe end of the twentieth century. Thus a new literatural style------networkliterature came out. Network literature naturally is a special form of popular culture. It was not only the result of literature fitting to the democratization of cultural spirit, but the outcome of new technology developing swiftly and violently. Influence of deconstructive thought and the requirement of the public to participate and enjoy the largest culture, were the basic and inner reasons for the emergence of this literary style.In a word, modernism literature, post-modernistic literature and network literature make up a whole plate of the western literature of twentieth century. The succession of the three from essence, lordliness to the disintegration of meaning, and to the popularization and democratization of western literature, embodies the developing process that the democraticconsciousness of culture and literature is constantly uncovering and strengthening.