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2 Literature review
This novel has been widely noticed by the critics since published in America 1900. In the early time after being published, it was regarded as a bad book. Many critics looked at sister Carrie as a reprobate woman, thought that she was enticed by the material desire ,sacrificing her virtue to become the mistress of the salesman and then the mistress of a hotel manager. However, as the time goes by, many critics become to regard Carrie as a fighting, sensitive and unyielding woman with formalism and inpidualism. Although on the surface she was kind of reprobate, her heart was not such at all.
Reviewing the critic record on Sister Carrie, many critics hold different ideas on the depict of Carrie, and agree on the depict of reprobate Koss woe.
When it goes to 1930s, people’s arguments on Sister Carrie transit from the moral theory into politics and literature. The critics looked at Sister Carrie as the product and defense of American capitalism.
From 1978, some Chinese scholars showed great interests in this novel. They analyzed it from various literate perspectives such as naturalism, realism, feminism, structuralism and psychological analysis. Moreover some critics focused on the question that the Dreiser was a novelist of realism or naturalism.
In 1980s, a number of critics looked at it as the belief and values of the day that Dreiser lived.
In the new century, critics focused on the writing skills of the city life in this novel. More noticeable is the tensile force of Sister Carrie which records American society’s consumption culture in the process of modernization. Jiang Daochao (2001,102)criticized Carrie that she possessing a wild heart but poor intelligence, is full of sensation and desire.
Recently, some scholars examine the relations between the modern male and female in the novel. For example, Jinrong(2007,159) , once wrote in his book that put the deception in the consumption social context, with the industrialization in the male-oriented modern city, female was gradually alienated. The relations between male and female has become sheer monetary and business deal. Zhu Zhenwu(2006,137), unscrambled this novel from the perspective of female ecologic criticism. He thought the sharp bulging of the modern men-oriented city and the booming of the city industrial civilization at the same time made the alienation of women. This book arouse people’s question on values of material civilization and spiritual civilization.
3 The Theory of Materialization Proposed by Lukacs
3.1 Meterialization Theory
Materialization is an important concept in Lukacs' philosophy. Alienation was originally a concept in philosophy. The concept of "alienation" was first put into social political theory by Lukacs as a "conception tool" to investigate some social political problems. As early as 1920s, Lukacs revealed that alienation in capitalist society is inevitable by the analysis of the relation between materialization and commodity production. He stands on the ground that materialization is the inherent phenomenon of commodity society and grows as commodity production develops. Modern capitalist society is such a highly developed commodity society whose fundamental principle is the commodity exchange. All social and interpersonal relations are under the cloak of the relation among objects. Thus, commodity exchange and its materialization penetrate into various walks of social life, leading the concept of "alienation" to the field of common society as a good narrator of modern capitalism. Lukacs believes that if a
commodity exchange is to become the universal aspects of society, it would be able to have a decisive influence on all forms of life.
Lukacs specially uses this theory to explain the alienation of capitalist society. According to him , though human being can handle the objective rules, they remains eager to change the objective progress by their behaviors or activities. From a subjective point, in the places where market economy is in full development, a person's activity is alienated with himself. It can be said that part of human activity exists as commodity, independent from human beings.