Decadence and Mass Culture： The Novel as a Panorama. The Case of Bruges-La-Morte

Today＇s idea of the so-called fin-de-sibcle is still somewhat inexact and incomplete. This lack of precision originates from a deeply rooted methodological approach which consists of considering the respective developments of literature, art, and science in isolation, without paying attention to any interference or reciprocal contamination. This defective method also affects the overlaps and contacts between high culture and popular culture. Despite the progress made over recent years, there are few researchers who approach their objective with a real awareness of the complexity of a time period which saw the appearance of mass culture in the current sense and an unprecedented boom in scientific and technological development.1 To this end, the example of the great German philosopher Walter Benjamin and his studies on Paris during the 19th century----collected in the essays on the great French poet Charles Baudelaire and especially in the monumental and unfinished work The Arcades Project--is, without doubt, a model to follow. Taking the path suggested by Benjamin, this article sets out a revision of the novel Bruges-la-Morte （1892） by the Belgian writer Georges Rodenbach, considered one of the major exponents of thefin-de-sikcle decadence, which goes beyond the usual approach of a symbolist reading, by paying special attention to the frictions between literature and technology on one hand, and between literature and popular entertainment on the other.

A Spatial Turn of Folklore in the Context of Urbanization: From Folk Culture to Mass Culture

Urbanization is the most prominent change nowadays. The most prominent thing brought by urbanization is change in traditional folklore. In contemporary China, urbanization is accompanied by modernization. Under the influence of consumer culture and the modern media, traditional rural folklore is gradually evolving into urban mass culture. Additionally, it is being spread by a big wave of informatization, characteristic of the digital revolution. Traditional rural customs are always important contents of folklore study, but nowadays and in the future, the research focus of Chinese folklore studies needs to be adjusted. At the same time, individual folklore study needs to be turned into holistic culture study under that specific context.

The influence of the mass culture on the contemporary college students＇ daily life

The mass culture penetrates into the world of the daily life of the contemporary college students in all directions. As the most sensitive group of the cultural assimilation, the college students practice various forms of the mass culture in their daily life. The popular culture and the everyday life are inseparable. The mass culture influences and changes the concept of our everyday life and the practice of our daily life, and enriches the connotation of the popular culture. The popular culture greatly enriches and expands the daily life of the college students with the features of the image, the nationhood and the consumption, but it also brings the negative effects that cannot be ignored. The daily life of the college students can be divided into several relative meanings according to their contents and forms, including the communication plate, the emotional plate and the leisure plate. Every meaning plate is concerned about the generation of values in the daily life of the college students, and the mass culture gives fresh and complicated contents to these meanings. How to find the values of their life and how to present oneself is the difficult problems and missions faced by the contemporary college students.

A "Symptomatic Reading" of the Mass Culture Critique and Its Implications for the Reconstruction of Contemporary Chinese Literary Theory

The critique of mass culture is a core theory of the Frankfurt School. Entering China in the early 1990s, this critique enjoyed an initial but brief acclaim. As an over-reaction and over-interpretation stemming from painful historical memories, it tended to impede the impartial assessment of mass culture and the culture industry, resulting in obvious theoretical blind spots and gaps and making a “symptomatic reading” necessary. Today, the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture is still of value and significance as an intellectual resource and historical reference, but it warrants further scrutiny when used to analyze practical issues. Given the burgeoning of mass culture and the cultural industry presently under way in the Chinese market economy, we should rise above previous intellectual limitations and theoretical misunderstandings to give due weight and active encouragement to the positive energy of mass culture and the cultural industry. The construction of Chinese literary discourse has its own distinctive pattern, and must orient itself toward China and the contemporary era, and particularly toward the practical development of contemporary China in the current period of transition. The academic counterpart of this is a three-dimensional platform consisting of level of thought, value concepts, and Chinese characteristics.

Theodor W.Adorno's Culture Industry Theory

As one of the central figures in the Frankfurt school.Theodor W.Adorno thinks the rise of culture industry is resulting from increased rationalization and standardization within the society.The culture industry is an entertainment industry system which copies and delivers the commercialized noncreative culture product on a large scale through modern science and technology.And it may deceive,enslave and rein the people through the entertainment products,and cause several negative impacts on the mass culture.

Contributions of Chinese Botanists to Plant Tissue Culture in the 20th entury

This paper looks back to the development of plant tissue culture in China in the last century. Since 1934, tissue culture studies in China has kept up with the international development in the fields. Progress has been made by Chinese in nearly every branches of tissue culture, including in vitro organogenesis, shoot tip culture, anther culture, ovary culture, endosperm culture, protoplast culture as well as mass cell culture. On the basis of reviewing the articles written by Chinese on plant tissue culture, the internationally recognized contributions are specially mentioned. The applications of plant tissue culture to agriculture and industry in China are also introduced.

Innovative method of culturing bdelloid rotifers for the application of wastewater biological treatment

This study aims to establish a simple and efficient method for the mass culture of bdelloid rotifers,which is the basis for the application of bdelloid rotifers as biological manipulators to improve wastewater biological treatment performance.A common bdelloid rotifer,Habrotrocha sp.,in a wastewater biological treatment system was selected as the culture target.Rotifers fed on flour could reproduce faster than those fed traditional food such as Chlorella vulgaris or mixed bacteria.As a rotifer food,flour has the advantages of simple preparation,effortless preservation,and low cost compared to live Chlorella vulgaris or mixed bacteria,so it is more suitable for the mass culture of rotifers.The optimal rotifer culture conditions using flour as food were also studied.According to the experimental results,the recommended rotifer culture conditions arc a flour particle size of 1 a flour concentration of 6×10^(6) cell/mL,a temperature of 28℃,a pH level of 6.5 and salinity of 100-500 mg/L.In addition,the sludge volume index in the sequencing batch reactor(SBR)with the addition of cultured rotifers was 59.9 mL/g at the end of operation and decreased by 18.2%compared to SBR without rotifer,which indicates that the cultured rotifers still retained the ftinction of helping to improve sludge settling.This function may be related to the rotifer's role in inhibiting bacteria from producing loosely bound extracellular polymeric substances in the SBR.