题目：A Theory of Cultural Scenes

演讲人：Dr. Lawrence Rothfield, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Department of English, University of Chicago

时间：2012年6月12日（星期二）下午3：30 – 5：30

地点：清华大学文南楼204会议室

主办：清华大学外文系、清华大学比较文学与文化研究中心

演讲者简介：Lawrence Rothfield got his B.A. in English at Stanford University and his Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature in Columbia University. His dissertation is entitled “Literary Realism and Clinical Discourse,” supervised by the well-known late Edward Said. He is author of three books:Vital Signs: Medical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Fiction(Princeton University Press, 1992);Chicago Music City: A Report on the Music Industry(2007), andThe Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum(University of Chicago Press, 2009). He is editor of two books:Unsettling "Sensation": Arts-Policy Lessons from the Brooklyn Museum of Art Controversy(Rutgers University Press, 2001) andAntiquities Under Siege: Cultural Heritage Protection after the Iraq War(Alta Mira Press, 2008). In his lecture Professor Rothfield will talk about the "Creative class" urban development theory, which is extremely popular today among mayors in the US, Europe, and South America. This theory suggests that cities now compete for knowledge workers, and do so by providing amenities designed to appeal to the tastes 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?