With the development of the new media and the spread of the market and consumerism, popular culture has come to overshadow elite culture. Popular culture carries a strong anti-traditional tendency within it. Its most important characteristic is that it breaks the monopoly of elite culture and endows itself with legitimacy. Popular culture can be seen as a way for the masses to express their own daily experience.

As the dominant culture in consumer society, popular culture possesses the attributes of both commercial production and cultural communication. Being a commodity, popular culture has to adjust itself to commercial logic and to the ethics of consumerism. Materialism has therefore become one of popular culture’s main values. In addition, as an important part of the cultural industry, popular culture becomes a carrier for the perceptions and rational consciousness of the people, thus shaping their cultural habits and attitudes.

The transformation ongoing in popular culture and in the attitude towards culture itself will undoubtedly bring a shift in the literary discourse and in the way in which criticism is conducted. In the past, literature used to be recognized as an embodiment of high culture, representing truth, good and beauty. Literature is a great tradition of any civilized society, it reproduces life through a poetic language and shapes national traits through rationality, emotion and ethic. Modern literature is endowed with a high aesthetic autonomy. Through its own special language, form and structure, literature creates its own essence, and leads humanity towards beauty and freedom. However, due to the current changes occurring in popular culture and in cultural concepts, literature will develop in multiple directions, rather than being limited to its original field.

The rules of the market and of consumer culture which modern society follows have already completely displaced literature’s original features, while at the same time transforming the very foundations of culture. Literature has to keep up with the times, if it is remain attractive to the ordinary people. It is already just as closely linked with the digital media as it is with the paper media, promoting itself through the internet, mobile phones and text messages.

The transformation in the way literature is conceived of will also bring a radical change to the field literary criticism. Literary criticism will inevitably tend to become specialized, instead of being limited to the field of aesthetic criticism. A more specialized literary criticism will advocate a diversified, democratic, tolerant and comprehensive critical consciousness, opposing elite discourse. As a methodology and discourse paradigm however, specialized literary criticism certainly still needs to be put under practical and theoretical examination.

The author is from the School of Literature of South China Normal University.

The Chinese version appeared in Chinese Social Sciences Today, No. 545, 6th January, 2014.

Chinese link: http://www.csstoday.net/xueshuzixun/guoneixinwen/87105.html　

Translated by Chen Meina

Revised by Gabriele Corsetti