A Theory of Culture Scenes

Subject: A Theory of Culture Scenes
 
Speaker: Lawrence Rothfield (University of Chicago)Lawrence Rothfield (University of Chicago)
 
Time: 6:00 p.m. June 14 (Thursday),2012
 
Location: the 4th floor of Building 7, School of Management, GUCAS
 
About the Speaker:
 
 
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.