Alienation of the American Dream in the Context of Consumer Culture Taking Sister Carrie for Example

DOI

10.2991/cesses-19.2019.143How to use a DOI?

Keywords

alienation; American dream; consumer culture; naturalism; identity

Abstract

The beginning of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of consumer culture, under which context humanism and Puritan ethics embraced by tradition have been replaced by naturalism and hedonism. Dominating the American society, the ideology of naturalism is based on "the survival of the fittest" put forward by Darwin, while hedonism greatly emphasizes sensational relish and desire for current pleasure. Sister Carrie, a vivid portrayal of the early twentieth America, reveals profound influence of consumer culture over Theodore Dreiser and his naturalistic preference in both his objective narrative techniques and ideological proposition. In Sister Carrie, Dreiser depicts the American dream of three social strata, i.e. the underclass, the upper-middle class and the class trapped between the above two. Classified into the respective parts of applicable objects, means to achieve the dream and its anticipated outcomes, the American dream went through a tripartite alienation procedure, thereby being alienated as a whole. This representative novel has thrown America into a waste land, a nihilistic world where everywhere permeates shattered dreams, demonized evaluation system and lost souls.

Copyright

© 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yue'er Jiang
PY  - 2019/10
DA  - 2019/10
TI  - Alienation of the American Dream in the Context of Consumer Culture Taking Sister Carrie for Example
BT  - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Contemporary Education, Social Sciences and Ecological Studies (CESSES 2019)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 631
EP  - 637
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/cesses-19.2019.143
DO  - 10.2991/cesses-19.2019.143
ID  - Jiang2019/10
ER  -