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Eslite Magazines and the Shaping of Some Bourgeois Cultural Tastes in Taiwan---A Content Analysis of the Eslite Book Review and the Eslite ReaderWu, Chin-ching 16 November 2006 (has links)
Bombarded by various waves of consumer information,Taiwan has hit the road to the so-called ¡§style society¡¨ with the trend towards aestheticization of daily lives and growing emphasis on tastes, and in the meantime the industries, while churning out products, do not forget to compete for the interpretive power and symbolic control over the media. In Taiwan, as far as cultural tastes and lifestyle modeling are concerned, the ¡§Eslite phenomenon¡¨ shall not be ignored. With content analysis, this research probes into the editorial logic by which the Eslite Bookstore, as one of the important indicators on the map of Taiwan culture consumers¡¦ tastes, has tried to design its style-based Eslite Book Review and Eslite Reader magazines. In the end, the researcher deliberates over some visages of bourgeois tastes shaped by Eslite and contextualizes the findings in the class struggles for culture distinction as well as the recent social-economic changes in Taiwan.
As the research shows, the main editorial notion of Eslite Bookstore is to construct an orthodox and legitimized legitimate taste domain by the voices of those culturally powerful male experts. It aims to build up a consumer style that is different from the past bourgeois conspicuous consumption and offers certain symbolic repertoires for the pursuit of delicate culture and life.Proclaiming itself as with higher cultural capital, Eslite prefers to involve more cultural activities and discourses to demonstrate its superiority, and to balance practical functions with more style innovations to distinguish itself from peers. In general, Eslite Book Review and Eslite Reader maintain a consistent style that uniquely belongs to Eslite . During the period of Eslite Book Review, it stresses mainly on life attitude, aesthetic style the second; whereas, Eslite Reader puts aesthetic style on the top of life attitude. Neither in these two periods have conventional values been emphasized. Eslite skillfully takes advantage of the existing cultural capital from the academic and expert systems to polish its cultural taste, and then elegantly projects such a cultural taste onto its consumers.By doing so, it successfully attains the identification from the readership and achieves its purpose of accumulating cultural capital and transforming it into economic capital.
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