| Accompanying with the society's industrialization and commercialization, there came the popular culture. From its naissance, the opinions on how to appraise it have never gained unanimous agreements. On one side, the popular culture, characterized with its vulgarization, commercialization and latch production, overthrew the spirituality, non-utilitarian and uniqueness of the classical art; on the other, the popular culture demonstrates an excessively strong life force indeed, and it has become the main part of cultural consumption in people's daily life instead of classical culture. Thus, in spite of optimism or pessimism, the popular culture has become an important problem that the social academe must to be up against. The Western academic circles from Matthew Arnold to F.R. Levis, Frankford School, Cultural Studies School and John Fiske accumulated rich resource of popular culture's theories.Because of historical and social reasons, the appearance of Chinese popular culture was lagged. It did not come into appearance and developed into scale until the end of 1980s. The popular culture has not only challenged the traditional literary theory, but also rewrote the people's daily life, so it has become the key to understanding the Chinese condition of modern culture and ideology. In china, the appearance of popular culture, the criticism of popular culture and the introducing of the theory of popular culture were almost synchronous. To introduce Western theories in to china is positive for escalated Chinese popular culture criticism into a theoretical level in a short time; however, it also brought an inevitable question, i.e. the contradiction between the west theory and Chinese condition. This is also the base of our reflection today. This text, based on introductions of several Western theories which have brought influence to Chinese criticism, in connection with the background at that time, reviews the history of Chinese popular culture criticism. Further, it reflects some existing questions and several which should be paid attention to in the future study.The first part of the text is aimed to introduce ana evaluate several Western theories which have influenced Chinese popular culture criticism. It may includes the popular culture theory of F. R. Levis, the cultural industry theory of Frankford School, the culture theory of Birmingham School and the optimistic popular culture theory of John Fiske. Among these theories, Levis' popular culture theory has not imposed direct influence upon Chinese criticism, but, from the eye of this author's, in 1990s, regardless of humanism's supporters or popular culture's critics, they were of the lineal consistence with F. R. Levis, but not with Frankford School which has been thought to be total copied in common. The second part of the text introduces and analyzes practices of Chinese popular culture criticism. First of all, it provides an analysis of a set conversation in Shanghai Literature Theory in 1991. At that time, there were sharp critics pointing that the popular culture's criticism must be approached from the sociological and cultural angels. Finally, it introduces Dai Jin-hue's popular culture criticism. Her critical method of closely connecting the criticized objects always provides a great deal of enlightenments for us. The third part of this text, based on the first two parts, retrospect Chinese popular culture criticism from four points of view: the reality of Chinese popular culture, the former criticism practice, several Western theories which can be used in China, and the situation of critics. By all these reflections, this thesis expects to clear up the doctrinal confusion in Chinese popular culture criticism. |
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