Abstract
Ideology embodies the deployment mode of power operation. Its functions include negotiating the relationships between subjects and between subjects and society, while its effects may lie in the difference between individual perceptual experience and individual-disciplining hegemonic discourse. Literature plays an indispensable role in conveying ideology and supporting hegemonic order, while it is also an important vehicle to break away from the control of hegemonic discourse. Literary discourse and practice bear the dual function of aesthetic and political discourse, but literature needs to take a balanced stance functioning aesthetically and ideologically so as to be accepted as a text with both aesthetic values and cultural political implications. At the time when traditional rationality is at stake, sustained emphasis of Western literary theory on aesthetic ideology implies that the discourse power and spiritual liberation of the subject can only be realized through individual deep perceptual experience that conciliate the differences between individual and mainstream ideologies. The argumentations on aesthetic ideology in China need to elaborate on the materiality of aesthetics and ideology, the aestheticization of everyday life, and the construction of subjecthood, so as to pursue the vitality of socio-cultural practices.
First Page
195
Last Page
205
Recommended Citation
Tang, Li. 2020. "The Aesthetics and Ideology of Literature: A Discussion Focused on the Concept of Aesthetic Ideology in Contemporary Western Literary Theory." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 40, (4): pp.195-205. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol40/iss4/17
