Abstract
Walter Benjamin's meditation on modernity is the most significant in his theory, and his concept of aura apparently illuminates the transformation from traditional art toward modern one but essentially reveals the characteristics of popular culture as integration and formularization. His interpretation of the tragic drama, Baudelaire, Kafka, and Proust further exposes the nature of the avant-garde as a form going beyond the content. This illumination depicts two cultural patterns of modernity: discontent with reality that leads to injection of rationality into reality, and identification with reality that leads to acknowledge the random meaning from reality. These two patterns comprise the cultural vision of modernity, and both contain their own constructive and destructive capacity. The issue of cultural self-consciousness is thus re-problematizedd, and the paper argues that this self-consciousness will perform its functions in the characteristics of contemporary cultural of modernity.
First Page
164
Last Page
170
Recommended Citation
Wang, Yong. 2013. "Modernity, the Avant-Garde and Mass Culture: A Reflection Inspired by Walter Benjamin." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 33, (6): pp.164-170. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol33/iss6/11
