讲座题目：A Theory of Culture Scenes
演讲嘉宾：Lawrence Rothfield （University of Chicago）
时 间：2012年6月14日（周四）18:00
地 点：中关村管理学院7号楼4层
主 办：中科院研究生院房地产发展战略研究小组
Creative class urban development theory, which is extremely popular today among mayors in the US, Europe and South America, suggests that cities now compete for knowledge workers, and do so by providing amenities designed to appeal to the taste of college graduates. But this approach raises more fundamental questions: do college graduates all share the same tastes, or is there a spectrum of tastes? If some specific amenities appeal to college graduates, do these amenities appeal in the same way, or are there distinctive varieties of aesthetic experience? And since a city offers not just individual amenities but clusters, how do sets of amenities, or the experiences they offer, combine to constitute distinctive cultural scenes?
About the Author:
Lawrence Rothfield, Associate Professor
Department of English，Department of Comparative Literature
Research Affiliate, Cultural Policy Center
My research focuses on the way in which literature, criticism and other cultural activities are caught up within epistemic and political struggles. I am interested in understanding, in particular, how the nineteenth-century novel in England and France mutates in response to changes in what counts as knowledge (the emergence of physiology, statistics, economics, biology, linguistics, Darwinism), how cultural criticism carves out a niche for itself within the field of disciplines; and how fiction and criticism function as instruments of power. These concerns are reflected in my first book, Vital Signs, an analysis of the ways in which the realist imagination was shaped by the diagnostic techniques and professional tactics borrowed from clinical medicine. Since completing that relatively tightly focused project, I have broadened my scope to include a larger set of research questions about the utilities of culture.
