A Study On The Dilemma Of Artists' Existence From Multiple Theoretical Perspectives

A Hunger Artist is a great work of an Austrian novelist, Franz Kafka; Jonah was written by a French writer, Camus and Being not Acclimatized is a masterpiece of a Chinese avant-garde writer, Bei Cun. Most previous academic papers and works focus on a certain part of artists but think lightly of their existence. In past time, scholars usually studied these three works separately or studied them through comparing them with other's works. So far, there have been no Chinese scholars making a comparative analysis about these three works.Kafka, Bei Cun and Camus are writers who considerately concern people's soul, humanity and existence. They keep on probing into the moral crisis of people in modern society. The diversity of these three works leaves a wide area about the dilemma of artists' existence for further interpretation. Consequently, the present study will make a complete comparative analysis of A Hunger Artist, Being not Acclimatized and Jonah from the perspectives of modernism, western Marxism and cultural consumerism. This is for the sake of discussing the moral crisis in modern society and revealing the state of artists' existence in 21st century.This thesis consists of six chapters. The first chapter mainly talks about the similarity of main ideas in these three works in order to create the research perspective of the present study. The second chapter makes a literature about the history of "the existence of artist" so as to penetrate into the relationship between death and artist. The third chapter discusses these three works from the perspective of modernism and finds that the artists face an irreconcilable paradox of life, they confront with loneliness all the time and cannot exceed the disharmonious life. The fourth chapter conducts a critical study on these three works in the light of western Marxism. It fully elaborates the loss of humanity for complaining the established fact and awaking people's criticality and negativity by aesthetic redemption, which will provide a caution to the negative phenomenon appearing in the progress of modernization. The fifth chapter applies the cultural consumerism to interpret the existence of artist, and then brings the environment and restraints of modern art creations into light. This aims at discussing art and artist's ways of being and their values. Under the background of cultural consumerism, artists and their arts are gradually brought into marginalization and are squeezed into a narrow area between market and art. The existence of artist is faced with another choice. The sixth chapter makes a conclusion. Based on this, it starts a further demonstration. It suggests that A Hunger Artist, Being not Acclimatized and Jonah all reveal the existence of artist under the multiple perspectives in 20th century, which bears a transcendence and currency.