A Study Of Susan Sontag’s Literary Thoughts From The Perspective Of Aesthetic Modernity

With the continuous development of modern civilization,Faced with the widespread sense of homelessness and self-loss in society,Susan Sontag’s exploration of the aesthetic form of art,her concern for the subjective senses,her confidence in multiculturalism,and her advocacy and practice of understanding the world in an aesthetic way,actually adopt the critical position of aesthetic modernity.This position constitutes a new path to enter the complex visual threshold of Susan Sontag,and also opens a new dimension for her research.As a contemporary American literary critic,Susan Sontag’s critical areas include literature,film,photography,disease,and philosophy,and her thoughts concerns every aspect of American and even European literature and art.Unfolding behind her is the American contemporary cultural map.Concerned the existing research results,most of them start from the perspective of "formalism",and represent all thoughts with her previous propositions.this thesis puts Susan Sontag’s literary thought in the perspective of aesthetic modernity,tries to reveal the modern significance and aesthetic connotation of his thought,clarifies the correlation between the development of aesthetic modernity and Sontag’s own ideological transformation,and makes up for the lack of Sontag’s research.This article contains three parts: introduction,main body,and conclusion.The main body is divided into four chapters.The first chapter focuses on the "occurrence" of his literary thought.Firstly,it defines aesthetic modernity,clarifies the relationship between aesthetic modernity and modernity,and clarifies the background of the times and thoughts.It is hoped that aesthetic criticism will resist people’s emotional and spiritual numbness in the post-industrial period,activate people’s perception,and rescue people from the predicament of modernity,this chapter takes this as a starting point to reveal the motives of Sontag’s aesthetic criticism of instrumental rationality in her early thoughts.the second chapter focuses on Susan Sontag’s aesthetic criticism,focusing on "opposing interpretation","new sensibility" and "Camp",refining the core consciousness of his literary thought,that is,embracing multiple arts,affirming the salvation function of modern art,and breaking the mediocre state of existence with aesthetic eyes.The third chapter reveals Susan Sontag’s confusion and ideological change with the contradiction of aesthetic modernity as the motivation.Susan Sontag is a thinker who stands at the watershed from western modernism to post-modernism.After entering the1970 s,she timely discovered that under the impact of the consumption era and entertainment industry,the criticality of her early thoughts was dispelled by the market and instead became a shallow perceptual carnival.Therefore,"Reflection" and "Remembering " became the ideological themes in the later period.From Sontag’s reflection on the image world,Her memory of modernism,and her humanistic practice as a critical intellectual,this chapter reveals that Sontag began to change from an "aesthetician" to a "moralist" and began to reiterate the function and responsibility of literature and art.The fourth chapter place Sontag’s Literary Thoughts in the context of Western art and social development in the mid-twentieth century,taking Sontag’s journey from "aesthetic utopian thinking" to "the road to return to reality" as a clue,elucidating the significance of Sontag’s literary and artistic thoughts.