[School Seminar Series] Middle Class Fantasy as the Metonymy of Global Class Conflicts, 30 May

Last updated:2016-05-24

Topic: Middle Class Fantasy as the Metonymy of Global Class Conflicts
Speaker: Professor Zhou Xiaoyi (Beijing Foreign Studies University)
Language: Chinese

Time: 10:30AM, Monday, May 30, 2016
Venue: Room 403, School of Foreign Languages Building, South Campus, Sun Yat-sen University
Organizer: School of Foreign Languages, Sun Yat-sen University

Abstract: This paper explores the middle class lifestyle and its aesthetic representation in China as a Lacanian fantasy. This is an artistic socio-psychological space in which middle class subjectivity is constructed. As a consequence, the Marxist concept of contradiction between the upper and lower classes is totally ignored and fully repressed. Therefore this middle class fantasy could be considered, in Étienne Balibar and Pierre Macherey’s jargon, an “imaginary solution” to social conflicts. It interrupts the invasion of the Lacanian “Real”, and veils the trauma in reality with an aesthetic mask. In the ages of globalization, this middle class fantasy as the universal living standard goes beyond the boundary of classes and nations, and is becoming increasingly popular in China. It could be arguably said that middle class aestheticism is no more than the rhetoric of the expansion of financial capital or, in a certain sense, simply a metonymy of the repressed global class struggle.

School Seminar Series in 2016 Spring Semester:

Date	Speaker & Work Title	Language
2016.3.10	Gao Wenping On Mrs. Dalloway: A Human Geography Perspective	Chinese
2016.3.24	Liu Yuyu The Russian Sailor as Subversion to Marlow’s Narrative in Heart of Darkness	English
2016.4.14	Wang Beibei Friedrich Schiller’s Tragedy and Aesthetic Education — A study of Maria Stuarda	Chinese
2016.4.21	Chiu Gang-yan “Empire’s Repository”：Walter Scott’s Writing, Collection and Reading of China	English
2016.5.12	Zhu Yu Wordsworth as a Listener	Chinese
2015.5.19	Dai Fan Approaching Literature through Creative Writing	English/Chinese
2015.5.30	Zhou Xiaoyi Middle Class Fantasy as the Metonymy of Global Class Conflicts	Chinese
2015.5.31	Peter KITSON “The kindness of my Friends in England”: Chinese Visitors to Britain in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries and the Discourses of Friendship and Estrangement	English
2016.6.9	Ou Hong Aspects of Literature and Technology	Chinese
2016.6.16	Zhou Hui The Reception and Reconstruction of French Theories in America	Chinese