The Influence of Popular Culture on Contemporary Literature

As a commercial culture, popular culture must abide by commercial principles, which directly leads to the materialization of cultural creators. Powerful mass media actively collude with cultural and artistic creators, and even mass media guide or influence the creation and flow of culture and art, endangering the inherent value law of culture and art. Literary and artistic creators have to regard culture as an ordinary commodity and create according to market rules when producing culture. As a result, production replaced creation, imitation and replication replaced imagination and inspiration. Art is no longer to express inner desires and puzzles, to vent aesthetic tastes and impulses, to show one's own life and vitality, but to make money. The word "planning" in cultural circles is the expression of alienation of artists. Planning is to find out market factors such as market demand and consumer psychology, and then carry out cultural production. Cultural creation no longer considers the creator's inner desire and inspiration flash, and the creator loses his freedom. Moreover, popular culture is rarely something original by individuals, and it is often the result of collective imitation or replication for profit. The artist's free creation is completely denied and abandoned in popular culture.

Alienation of art:

Popular culture relies on market rules and commercial principles, which leads to culture and art becoming a means and tool to make money, no longer obeying the creative nature of freedom and the spiritual needs of aesthetics, catering to the tastes of the public and moving towards mediocrity and kitsch. Therefore, the original nature, purport and function of culture and art have undergone a fundamental reversal: from flaunting individuality, calling for freedom, criticizing reality and ideal orientation to sameness, calling for interests and entertainment, which led to the alienation of culture and art. Frankfurt School believes that when art is subject to others, it is no longer a purely personal spiritual field that exists independently, no longer performing the duties of criticism and negation, but succumbing to the laws of reality to prove its social utility, art will end itself.

With the rapid development of modern production technology, especially mass media technology, mass production and mass reproduction of mass cultural products are not only necessary, but also possible. However, standardized production has brought about the loss of artistic essence. "The' raw materials' of popular culture, like the parts of industrial products, are going to the cultural production line. Standardized and modular cultural production lines first design many fixed standard plots, characters and structures, just like installing a machine to prepare some standard parts first, and then mass production can be effortless. " Standardized production blocks the individual's expressive force and imagination, stifles the freedom of creation, loses artistic individuality, and degenerates artistic creation into product production. Frankfurt School has made a fierce criticism of popular culture, arguing that it violates the essence of art ... Art is a field that expresses subjectivity, and its essence lies in its differences. Real art should have the ability to subvert reality. Mass culture, on the other hand, completely dispels the essence of art and turns art from a force to promote human progress into a reactionary force that leads to human alienation.

Moreover, the entertainment cultural identity of popular culture, while promoting the infiltration of culture and art into public life, also makes culture and art go astray to some extent. Real art should have profound connotation and unique charm, and pursue freedom, eternity and significance. However, the entertainment of mass culture makes mass culture itself full of stimulating, rough and perceptual factors, and loses its lofty pursuit; People everywhere vent their emotions, indulge in emotional life, indulge in dark psychology, dispel deep-seated thinking and judgment, instantly replace eternity, vulgarity replaces sublimity, and excitement replaces charm. Adorno believes that the pursuit of material enjoyment and spiritual indulgence by popular culture is the degradation of human thinking ability and the dissolution of rebellious consciousness. Popular culture can't undertake the mission of redemption, and it doesn't give people anything substantial except making a lot of elusive and illusory things. As a result, popular culture dispelled the mission of traditional culture to guide mankind upward and became a force to alienate human nature.

Third, the alienation of popular culture to contemporary literature.

Under the influence of popular culture, some noteworthy changes have taken place in contemporary literature. The stardom, typology, symbolization and vogue of literary production have become the basic characteristics of contemporary literature. As a powerful discourse, popular culture has more and more profound influence on literary creation, which has changed the pattern of contemporary literature and led to the alienation of contemporary literature. The alienation of popular culture to contemporary literature is manifested in the following aspects.

First of all, literary star-making and star-making movement are developing vigorously. The prosperity of popular culture depends on the development of cultural industry, which is based on the star mechanism and constantly creates stars for us through the platform of popular culture. The recent emergence of "booksellers" is to "package" distribution mainly by shaping stars, thus earning profits. Yu is an example. Since 1992 was born with a "cultural journey", he has made great strides all the way. 1998 published Notes on Mountain Residence, and 1999 published first frost River. I frequently appear in colorful media, although his works have attracted a lot of boos (critics generally think that the overall level of Yu's prose is not as good as that of an episode). After that, Jia Pingwa, Chi Li and Hong Ying became the packaging objects of booksellers. In the late 1990s, with the gradual improvement of popular culture and the deep penetration of literature, star-like literary production became more systematic: booksellers chose potential targets, from cultivation to packaging to marketing, forming a complete market operation mode. Han Han, Jing M.Guo and other idol writers are the result of this star-making model. The stardom of popular culture not only brings the greatest profits to booksellers, but also reflects the weakening of literary spirit, which leads people to pay more attention to the image of writers rather than the meaning of literature itself. People are obsessed with Jing M.Guo's eye color and his ranking in Forbes list, and constantly speculate on the copyright lawsuit and ambiguous love history. The process of mass media and cultural industry conspiring to create cultural stars is actually a process of separating the essence and connotation of literature and alienating literature; Literature seems to enjoy a high degree of courtesy, but in fact it has been treated with banter and suffered a fatal blow.

Secondly, the typology of creation eliminates the individuality of literature. Under the strong influence of popular culture, typology permeates literary creation in all directions. Literary creation is dominated by detective novels, romance novels and martial arts novels. These novel types are highly typed in structural mode, and a work can be made by filling ready-made materials in corresponding positions. Various elements of literary creation, including characters, plots, language and ideas, appear in all aspects. "Petty bourgeoisie writing" always revolves around successful people, elegant villas, bars, cafes, making love and so on. Wang Shuo, who was once all the rage, believed that writing did not need imagination and relied on routines to promote the development of stories. "How many routines? Not much, 200 at most. It is estimated that the audience will forget to start again from the beginning. " At present, realistic novels also have a fixed writing mode, mainly focusing on the contradictions between reform and conservatism, corruption and anti-corruption, politics and emotion. Zhang Ping's "House of Flying Daggers" obviously conforms to the narrative style of detective novels, while "National Cadres" has failed to get rid of the shortcomings of typology in character setting, plot arrangement and story theme. The same is true of Hai Yan. His stories are always filled with the following elements: attractive policemen, gentle women, wits and courage, and unforgettable love. Haiyan skillfully transferred these elements to different tastes, and easily gained huge profits from popular culture in typed literary creation. At the same time, the development of typology will inevitably lead to the spread of symbolic meaning, and people's consumption is not for survival, but for symbolic meaning. Han Shaogong criticized the "symbolization of life", saying that the pain or happiness brought by villas, cars, fashion and jewelry are untrue. "Physiologically, where does a person need three sets of empty villas? But the fact that villas become symbols, cars, fashions, jewels and so on does not mean that the food of the hungry people in Africa is also a symbol. We can't say that those skinny blacks have no real pain. We can't say that they just fainted and died because of the lack of symbols. " The symbolization of literature caused by popular culture makes the intrinsic meaning and humanistic spirit of literary works empty, the reference of literature becomes an empty shell, and the symbolic meaning of worthless symbols is extremely expanded. It dispels the individuality of literature and makes the critical spirit of literature gradually decline.

Third, the vulgarization of interests lacks ultimate concern. Contemporary literature is full of vulgar works. It seems that only impulse and fun are the real life to explore instinct and excitement. These works realize the consumption demand of the middle class by reappearing people's desires and providing alternative satisfaction. Wei Hui is the representative. She advocates "body writing", which extends from "body" to sex and desire, and tells stories about human instinct in the form of self-presentation. It is a good thing that the human body has been rediscovered. Sadly, it was bought by popular culture and became a profit-making tool of popular culture. Wei Hui's positive response took this vulgarization and marketing selling point to the extreme, and described the plot of bathroom, bar, homosexuality and alcoholism in detail, thus going astray. While the content of literature is vulgar, its essence is gradually alienated. The deep reason here is the lack of humanistic spirit. In today's China, while consumerism is extremely prevalent, we can't find our spiritual home. As Lin Bai said: "In this era, we have lost our home, and our body is our home." Vulgarization, stardom and typology of literature containing economic interests are great temptations for writers, which inevitably inclines their creation in this direction.

In a word, China's one-sided emphasis on economic reform and lack of cooperation in the fields of culture and ideology made consumerism a new ideology, and mass culture expanded abnormally. As a result, material wealth masks spiritual poverty, sensory pleasure replaces ideological pursuit, and vulgar fashion crowds out elegant taste. People no longer pursue the meaning of life and become consumer animals. This should arouse our vigilance. Elite culture and aristocratic spirit are the best prescriptions to cure the ills of popular culture. Elite culture resists the vulgarity and anesthesia of mass culture, and aristocratic spirit is also a weapon of mass culture criticism. Consumer mass culture and transcendental minority culture (elite culture) restrict and complement each other, thus achieving the balance of human spirit. Humanistic intellectuals are the main body of building elite culture and aristocratic spirit, and they should shoulder the social responsibility of criticizing popular culture. However, many intellectuals not only failed to do so, but also blindly defended popular culture under the temptation of economic interests. The deeper problem here is the low quality of contemporary intellectuals in China. They lack basic self-awareness and critical spirit. They are not so much intellectuals as knowledge farmers (old intellectuals) or knowledge citizens (new intellectuals). They are short-sighted, insensitive, and pursue worldly fame and fortune, but lack humanistic quality and higher spiritual pursuit, which is an important reason for the abnormal development of mass culture in China today. Only when the intellectuals in China fully grow up and become free and independent thinkers and critics will they enthusiastically build elite culture and criticize popular culture. As a result, popular culture gives full play to its reasonable side, enriches people's leisure life and satisfies people's reasonable desires, while elite culture and aristocratic spirit purify people's souls, improve people's spiritual cultivation, give full play to its guiding role, and lead the whole human society to a higher and more beautiful realm.