Middle-class subjectivity and moral value in popular British screen fantasy.

通过书面提交和视频，本研究项目将分析和比较21世纪的英国奇幻电影《哈利波特》和最近的《他的黑暗材料》电视连续剧，探讨阶级编码如何在新自由主义下再现道德价值的意识形态。在结构性阶级不平等通常被否认的政治文化中，个人身份、个人责任、抱负和企业家精神在“自然化”的自由市场中占主导地位。斯基格斯、劳勒、泰勒和利特勒等社会学家对当代英国的阶级再生产和价值归因进行了精辟的研究。然而，当涉及到媒体文本时，他们对现实电视和社会现实主义电影中工人阶级代表的狭隘关注将阶级斗争的研究边缘化到现实主义领域，并忽视了非常流行的幻想文本及其再现的中产阶级主体性。这种疏忽，再加上推崇英国电影现实主义和历史经典的电影研究文化，使得非现实主义和日益混杂的电影类型需要严肃的批评关注。通过参与这一领域的差距，该项目将产生对英国流行电影和电视文化方式的新理解，特别是幻想的“想象力”，有助于中产阶级主体性的建设，作为公认善良的“自由-保守”等级制度中道德价值的主要体现。《哈利波特》系列在国际上的流行凸显了英国叙事中依赖于一种阶级编码语言的深远影响。该项目将利用电影和电视研究，使用布尔迪乌斯式的“大写字母”和巴塞斯式的“代码”对场景进行叙事分析。一个跨学科的方法是必要的情况下，在更广泛的话语背景下的案例研究。最后，我将制作一篇视频文章，以有趣的方式参与文化互文，并在我的分析中引入更个人的声音。

Through a written submission and video this research project will analyse and compare British fantasy screen fiction of the 21st century in the Harry Potter films and the recent His Dark Materials television series, interrogating how class coding reproduces ideologies of moral worth under neoliberalism. In a political culture where structural class inequalities are typically disavowed, a rhetoric of individualised identity, personal responsibility, aspiration and entrepreneurship in the 'naturalised' free market predominates. Sociologists like Skeggs, Lawler, Tyler and Littler are generating incisive work on class reproduction and value attribution in contemporary Britain. However, when it comes to media texts, their narrow focus on the analysis of working-class representation in reality television and social realist film marginalises studies of class struggle to the realm of realism and overlooks hugely popular fantasy texts and the middle-class subjectivities they reproduce. This oversight, in combination with a film studies culture that privileges British cinema's realist and historical canon, leaves non-realist and increasingly hybridised genres in need of serious critical attention. By engaging with this gap in the field, this project will generate new understanding of the way British popular film and television culture, in particular the 'imaginative power' of fantasy, contributes to the construction of middle-class subjectivities as the principal embodiment of moral value within a 'liberal-conservative' hierarchy of recognised goodness. The international popularity of the Harry Potter franchise highlights the profound impact of a reliance on a coded language of class within British narratives. This project will use film and television studies for a narrative analysis ofmise-en-scène using Bourdieusien 'capitals' and Barthesian 'codes'. An interdisciplinary approach is necessary to situate case studies in wider discursive contexts. Finally, I will produce a video essay to engage playfully with cultural intertexts and introduce a more personal voice to my analysis.