| As a contemporary novelist in America,Don DeLillo criticizes the politics,economy and culture in modern society with his austere writing.His works are involved in diverse themes such as consume,technology,cold war,media,waste and paranoia which profoundly reveal American's sense of anxiety and crisis.Underworld,published in 1997,is the longest and richest novel of him in which the history of the last half of 20th century is portrayed and the description of the waste can be found everywhere.Basing on Benjamin's“trash aesthetics”as main theory and sociology and cultural studies as subsidiary theory,with the description of the waste as the main line,the aesthetics of redemption on the waste is illustrated in the processing of deconstructing and reconstructing by the theorists and artists.There are three parts of this thesis:introduction,main body and conclusion.Introduction as the first chapter states the status and influence of Don DeLillo and Underworld,overseas and domestic literature review,significance and outline.The overseas literature review concentrates on the Cold War,identity and narrative.As for the theme of“waste”,it mainly illustrates that the waste management and conceptual accumulation has become the essential part of economic and cultural process from sociology and cultural studies.Domestic literature is not as much as abroad ones and topics on“trash aesthetics”are supposed to be further researched.The significance is to enrich the research results of Don DeLillo and raise human awareness of the waste in our life.The main body includes Chapter Two,Three,Four and Five.Chapter Two is the theoretical background.The two background theories“sociology”and“cultural studies”are generalized first,and then Benjamin's“trash aesthetics”is sorted out.After the 20th century,researches involved in sociology focus more on the fields like spectacle,consumer and culture.As an interdisciplinary critical theory,cultural studies are born at the right moment in which the mass culture,urban culture and consumer culture are the key points in studies of Frankfurt school.Benjamin,as a member of Frankfurt school,his theories on urban space and literature studies are highly praised by the later scholars.This novel will be analyzed through Benjamin's research method“trash aesthetics”which is his approach to understand history.In Chapter Three,the alienated tendency of the waste is analyzed from three aspects:quantity,technology and institutions.Along with the growth of the society,the alienated accumulation of the waste has become a kind of spectacle which causes great changes in the processing techniques.From the early landfill,compaction,and recycle to the enormous landfill,the techniques of processing the waste vary from general ones to cutting-edge technologies and the growth of the groups change from domestic companies to international corporations.All of these phenomena point out the tendency of alienation.In Chapter Four,the redemptive meaning of two kinds of landfills is analyzed from the point of history combined with Benjamin's theory.The conceptual waste put forward by the trash designer and the waste theorist is the representation of the alienated garbage spectacle.Through deconstruction and reconstruction of the realities,the landfills become remote landscape of nostalgia to remind human of their feelings when confronting the history and death.In Chapter Five,from the perspective of art,two artworks that bring the“shock”experience are studied.The landscape painting and the Watts Towers built by arts also convey the artistic redemption to evaluate the value of“trash aesthetics”through the visual attraction.Chapter Six as the conclusion holds that DeLillo reveals the metaphorical world of modern science,technology and culture beyond the alienated waste accumulation in his novel.His writing of redemption about the waste in history and art is a coincidence of Benjamin's philosophical idea of history and art that warns human to behave through the inspiration and profound meaning of artists and theorists. |
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