Abstract
Thanks to China’s development of information technology and secularization, popular culture increasingly affects contemporary people’s values, psychological structure, and emotional mode. The core characteristic of popular culture is to arouse, engage, and satisfy the audience’s pleasure, which is realized through three approaches. First, popular culture establishes a textual world of “hyperreality” through simulation techniques and provides the audience with an experience of “living elsewhere.” Second, popular culture exposes the outmoded ideology in daily life through “poaching” and offers the audience a channel for self-expression. Third, it rebuilds the textual world through a “producerly text,” so that the audience can attain the goal of self-healing. In terms of its reception, the addicts of popular culture are often consumers of “projection and identification.” They seek satisfaction from the text to compensate their psychological deficiency, which derives from their life experience of deprivation of suppression. Therefore, popular culture plays a role of “virtual heterotopia” in contemporary society, which necessitates researchers to establish a new research paradigm and to engage the liberating potential of popular culture through reasonable guidance.
Keywords
popular culture, audience, pleasure, mechanism of pleasure
First Page
43
Last Page
51
Recommended Citation
Gou, Yanshu. 2022. "Virtual Heterotopia: The Mechanism of Pleasure and Reception of Contemporary Popular Culture." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 42, (4): pp.43-51. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol42/iss4/5
