论美国后现代主义文学的通俗化——以资本主义文化逻辑为批评视角

On the Popularization of Postmodern American Literature: With the Cultural Logic of Capitalism as a Critical Perspective

高雅与通俗虽然历来是文学批评论争的焦点之一,但受社会的后现代性、反理性哲学以及当代文学发展潮流的影响,二战之后的美国文学在当代大众文化语境下,改变了欧洲文学的传统思维模式和叙事模式,形成了当代资本主义文化逻辑内后现代主义文学思维与叙事的新模式,反传统、摈弃终极价值和崇尚零度写作等特征成为学术界对美国后现代主义文学所下的定论。然而,这些基本特征仅为其表象,美国后现代主义文学在这些表象之下对人的终极价值追求却并未发生实质性的改变。文学的通俗化发展则成为美国当代文学的基本发展趋向。在当代资本主义文化逻辑内对人性的文学叙事与反思,仍是美国当代文学家,尤其传统意义上的精英文学作家作品中叙事与反思的核心内容。这就形成了美国后现代主义文学对人的终极价值追求的另类思维和叙事模式,将当下资本主义社会的非完美性以文艺美学和政治美学的完美性表现出来,进而形成当代美国作家在资本主义文化逻辑内以通俗化的方式进行社会批判和人本质弱点批判以及人类理想社会憧憬的新途径。因此,唯有从马克思主义辩证唯物论和历史唯物论的认知视角,从作品形式与思想内涵的关系入手来探讨美国后现代主义文学的通俗化发展,才能对其文学价值作出相对公允的评价。

Although the dispute between elegance and popularity has been one of the focal points of literary criticism, American literature after World War II has changed its thinking and narrative modes in the European tradition due to the influence of social modernity in the context of contemporary popular culture, the anti-rational philosophy and the contemporary literary trend. It formed the postmodern mode of literary thinking and narration in the logic of contemporary cultural logic of capitalism, so that its features of being anti-tradition, abandoning the ultimate values and advocating zero writing have become the basic conclusions of critics. The popularizing development has become the tendency of contemporary American literature. However, those features are merely the superficial literary representation of postmodern American literature, and its pursuit of the ultimate human values in its literary representation has never changed. Both the human nature narrative and reflection in contemporary cultural logic of capitalism remain the core content that writers, especially elite writers in the traditional sense, keep producing. As a result, they have formed a special mode of pursuing ultimate human values in postmodern American literature. Writers represent aesthetic perfection in the realm of both artistic aesthetics and political aesthetics to make social imperfection perfect in contemporary capitalist society. In turn, this has led to a new way for contemporary American writers to make critiques of society and the essential weaknesses of human beings and to envisage an ideal human society in a popularized way within the logic of capitalist culture. Therefore, only from the perspective of Marxist dialectical materialism and historical materialism and by taking the relationship between literary form and content as the starting point in postmodern American literature studies, can we explore its features of popularizing development and make relatively fair evaluation of its values.