Eliminate The Boundary,Rebuild The Connection:A Study On Leslie Fiedler's Mass Culture Theory

Leslie Fiedler is a famous American literary critic and cultural critic,also one of the early postmodernists.Fiedler's mass culture theory is developed from his critical practice of mass culture,especially of mass literature.Therefore,one of the characteristics of Fiedler's mass culture theory is his attention to popular literary works,instead of solely exploring the commodity,market,media technology,ideology and other factors in the phenomenon of mass culture.The forming background of Fiedler's mass culture theory includes two aspects:literary theory and existing mass culture theory.The literary theoretical background of his theory is mainly related to the New Criticism,New York Intellectuals and Myth Criticism.Fiedler aims to break the situation that the New Criticism makes literature and literary criticism the exclusive property of the few scholars in the college.Fiedler was an early member of the New York Intellectuals whose interest in native American literature had a great influence on his study of popular culture.The concepts of "prototype" and"collective unconsciousness" in Mythological Criticism provide direct theoretical resources for Fiddler's study of mass culture.The existing theoretical background of mass culture is mainly Arnold and Leavis' elitist cultural proposition,the critical theory of mass culture of Frankfurt school,and the debate on mass culture in the United States after world war II.Fiedler's position is different from that of Arnold,Levi and Frankfurt school.He expressed his support for mass culture for the first time in the debate about it in the United States.Fiedler's mass culture theory is based on the concept of "generalized-literature"derived from the equation of "literature=prototype+symbol".In his opinion,movies,TV series,comics,pop songs and so on are just a new way of expression of literature in the new stage of social development.They are the same as literature reflected in books of the traditional printing era.They are essentially mythos and archetypes.The core of Fiedler's mass culture theory is myth and "Ecstasis".In his view,mass culture is a manifestation of American national strength,which creates a contemporary mythology different from Greek mythology and Hebrew mythology."Ecstasis" is a new evaluation method created by Fiedler,in order to reconcile the tension between high culture and mass culture after he abandoned the moral dimension and aesthetic dimension—the traditional evaluation method of literature.By means of "Ecstasis",which focuses on the feelings and intuitions of the recievers,the boundary between class culture and mass culture will no longer exist,and the differences between the elite and the mass will also be eliminated,and people will be connected through the feelings that they all possess.On the practical level,Fiedler questioned modernist novels and poems,and praised and advocated science fiction and superhero comics.He believes that the literary standard of modernism was not only no longer suitable for the new social context,but also created a division between the minority and the majority.Fiedler calls for a kind of postmodern literature,a literary form that can make the divided society heal again.Fiedler's mass culture theory has a profound influence on the development of feminist criticism and racial criticism.Fiedler explored the neglected value of popular novels written by female writers in the period when the culture was dominated by WASP(White Anglo-Saxon Protestant)males,which provided support for the re-writing of literary history of feminism.Fiedler's analysis of the relationship between white people and colored people,as well as the portrayal of colored people in popular novels,also influenced the development of racial criticism.In addition,Fiedlers deconstruction of the authority of modernist literature also played a certain role in promoting the development of postmodernism.Today,the development of new Internet media has brought mass culture to a new stag.In this stage,everyone can easily express their own evaluation of mass culture works;experts and scholars no longer enjoy the privilege in the area of mass culture criticism,because nowadays everyone can become a critic of mass culture.Fiedlers attention to the local American mass culture also inspired us to reflect on the development of Chinese mass culture.It's a sincere expectation that Chinese mass culture can also give birth to more high-quality contemporary national myths.