A Study Of Paulauster’s Novels From The Perspective Of Consumer Culture Criticism

Paul Auster is a contemporary American writer with a strong sense of cultural reflection.Based on the cultural standpoint of anti-consumerism,he objectively and truly describes the existential crisis and spiritual predicament of individuals and groups in the post-modern cultural background,and also discusses the possible strategies to change this unreasonable status quo.This paper focuses on the literary writing of postmodern consumer culture in Auster’s novels,analyzes the textual representations of these descriptions of consumerism literature with the help of Baudrillard’s theory of consumer society and the literary criticism method of close reading of texts,and then analyzes the different coping ways of different representative characters in the novel in the situation of materialistic society.Their choices of action,negative or positive,reflect the general existence of people in the post-modern society of the United States.On this basis,the paper further analyzes the literary and cultural value of the American post-modern consumer culture in Auster’s works,and points out that although many characters in the novel fail to resist the realistic predicament,their unremitting efforts to change the status quo reflect the author’s pursuit and thinking of the meaning of human existence freedom.The paper is divided into three parts: introduction,text and conclusion.The main contents and basic views of each part are as follows:In the introduction part,author Paul Auster’s life and literary creation are briefly introduced,the research status at home and abroad is sorted out and the current research progress is summarized.On this basis,this paper briefly analyzes Baudrillard’s theory of consumer society,and expounds the feasibility of analyzing Auster’s novels from the perspective of consumer culture criticism.The first chapter analyzes the three forms of consumer cultural landscape described in Auster’s novels,and describes how materialistic contemporary American cultural concepts control individual’s external social space and inner spiritual space,making them voluntarily or involuntarily passive beings in urban life.First of all,in The Music of Chance and Timbuktu,Nashe,Pozzi and other characters are disciplined by money,or lost in the illusory consumption symbols highlighting material desires,and even become the conspirators of consumerism,trying to control others through this,and thus they become passive survivors under the discipline and control of consumption ideology.Secondly,in Sunset Park and other works,Auster analyzed the materialized living conditions of ordinary people in contemporary American cities by describing the changes in the relationship between people and "garbage".They were abandoned by the city like discarded objects.Finally,in works such as The Book of Illusion,those characters who are unwilling to be abandoned by the trend of urban consumerism choose to actively incorporate their bodies into the consumption chain of the city.Finally,with the encroachment of the body space by the consumer culture,the body becomes a consumer product and they are deprived of the autonomy of the body.The second chapter mainly illustrates how Auster constructs positive action strategies to resist the social tendency of consumerism through the survival choices of different characters in his novels.In the predicament of consumer culture transformed by post-modern capital power,the characters in the novel either lose their individual subjective initiative in assimilation,or seek the possibility of breaking through in refusal and overcoming.Among them,Nathan’s artistic redemption through writing and Ellen’s attempt to reconstruct self body space become effective attempts of individuals to overcome the oppression of materialized reality.The third chapter mainly discusses the reflection on the cultural dilemma behind Auster’s literary writing of consumerism and the critical value of this literary writing,analyzes the reasons for the failure of the characters’ spiritual resistance and the writer’s inquiry on the survival meaning of the group.On the one hand,because the reality level and individual level of reality in the post-modern cultural context has been in a state of crisis,so it is difficult to construct the spiritual home in the cold materialized reality with real emotions and life experience.On the other hand,trying to counter the tide of ideologically driven consumerism with the efforts of only a few people is obviously difficult to achieve.The conclusion summarizes the main points of this paper and points out that Auster not only artistically reproduces various practical drawbacks in American post-modern culture through the description of various forms of the post-modern urban consumer culture landscape and the efforts of many characters to overcome the materialization state,it also expresses his deep concern for individual and group spiritual predicament in contemporary American culture and his hope and confidence to change the predicament.