A Study Of Tony Bennett’s Literary Theory

Tony Bennett is a British Marxist scholar,cultural theorist and sociologist.Bennett had a theoretical cultural turn in the late 1970s,but he has always put literary study through the study of culture.Bennett believes that literature is studied as a very important cultural form and the development of literary form is explored as an important form of cultural change.Based on literary works,he uses multiple methods of different disciplines such as sociology,history,linguistics,psychology and political science to analyze cultural phenomena and daily life.Overall,Bennett’s literary study can be count as an important source of his cultural study with a strong cultural tendency.At the same time,Bennett inherited in English literature the traditional humanism and practicality to carry out practices in the field of literary education and self-governance from different perspectives,i.e,institutions,institutions and policies.It can be said that Bennett’s cultural study takes literature as its starting point as well as the basement,and in the mean time his literary theory refracts and participates in his culture studies.Based on careful reading of Bennett’s works,this paper,focusing on the key words such as "literature","culture","text" and " governance",makes clear the outline of Bennett’s literary theory by using the method of keyword research.At the same time,with the combination of methods,i.e.,history and logic,I will place Bennett in the historical context of Marx’s literary criticism and cultural criticism in the second half of the 20th century to grasp the change of his thoughts.The first part is introduction,which talks not only about Bennett’s academic track,research field and research status,but also about the reason of choosing the topic and methods of this paper.The first chapter makes an overall comment on Bennett’s literary theory according to the dynamic development of his personal thought.The first section discusses how Bennett inherited,developed and applied Marxist tradition from 1960s to 1970s.The second section,through the theoretical dialogue between Russian formalism and Marxist literary criticism,expounds how Marxist literary criticism should inherit the theoretical legacy of bourgeois aesthetics,including formalist literary theory.Thus,beyond the "metaphysics of the text",Marxist literary criticism could open new theoretical space.The third section discusses that Bennett was influenced by post-structuralism,deconstructionism and Foucault’s theory in the late 1970s,and constructed the post-Marxist literature and politics with post-modern characteristics.The second chapter analyzes Bennett’s cognition of the concept of the "literature".The first section discusses Bennett’s inheritance and development of British literary tradition to obtain his own "literature" and interpretation;The second section,focusing on the relationship between history and literature,explores how Bennett got out of the aesthetic category of literature and understood literature systematically and historically.The third section discusses how Bennett intermingled British literary and cultural studies with a view to developing literary criticism in the context of culture.In the fourth section,aiming at the relationship between texts and texts,he put forward that the new focus of literary research is the intertext nature,and developed a theory of intertextual relations from the outside of the text to the inner and inter-text of the text.The third chapter analyzes the practical forms of four kinds of literature,such as reading formation,justifying popular novel,the reading of popular text and the education of literature.The first section focuses on the relationship among text,reader and context to discuss the new reading theory.In the second section,Bennett deconstructed the construction of "classical text" in Marxist criticism,which attempted a proposition that the popular novel is a kind of literature.The third section discusses Bennett gave a new era color to the theory of literary production,literary dissemination and literary acceptance in the context of popular culture and "the turn to Gramsci".Taking the Bond text as an example,he analyzed the meaning of "author" in social texts,material production,media transmission and public reading represented by "figuring readers".The fourth section is the literary application of Bennett’s view of governance.Through literary education and self-formation,he analyzed the relationship between aesthetics,freedom and governance.On the basis of a comprehensive analysis of Bennett’s literary thought,this thesis summarizes Bennett’s enlightenments and limitations.In a word,Bennett innovates and develops Marxist literary criticism by combining literature,culture and governance.In this way he moves from theoretical criticism to practice,providing successfully constructive advice for our country in term of using the power of literary system and policy to shape the subject aesthetically.