20世纪40年代“纽约知识分子”与大众文化:论索尔·贝娄《洪堡的礼物》中的诗人之死

The New York Intellectuals and mass culture in the 1940s:Death of the poet in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift

以往对当代美国小说《洪堡的礼物》的研究主要关注功利主义、物质主义对高雅文学造成的危害,但却甚少探讨这一现象背后的文化成因。本研究指出,这部小说刻画了大众文化作为垄断资本主义对高雅文学构成的威胁。正是大众文化和高雅文学二者之间无法弥合的矛盾造成了20世纪40年代现代主义文学的衰落以及诗人之死。小说中对大众文化的批判离不开作者索尔·贝娄及"纽约知识分子"群体对大众文化的立场。同时,他们对大众文化的态度又深受同为犹太知识分子的法兰克福学派影响。

Previous research on the contemporary American novel Humboldt’s Gift has mainly focused on the damages brought to the highbrow literature by utilitarianism and materialism,but the cultural causes underneath this phenomenon have never been touched upon.It is found in this novel that the mass culture was manipulated by the monopolistic capitalism as a threat to the highbrow literature.The irreconcilable conflicts between the mass culture and the highbrow literature led to the decline of the modernist literature and the death of the modernist poet in the 1940s.This negative attitude toward the mass culture originated from Bellow’s opinion on the mass culture,which is profoundly influenced by the New York Intellectuals’criticism of the mass culture and the mass culture theories proposed by Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt School.