Title: The Society of Spectacle in Julian Barnes’ England, England and the Hyperreal Englishness

Abstract: Julian Barnes, the contemporary English writer, used to be valued and labeled as a postmodernist fiction writer since his two well-know novels, Flaubert’s Parrot and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, used such postmodern writing techniques as pastiche, parody and fragments. However, England, England, the novel published in 1998, has shown the author’s intention to distance himself from postmodernist tags with his serious reflections on Englishness and invented traditions. The novel manifests that the common sense understanding of Englishness is just a projection of mass desire in terms of Lacanian concept “mirror stage.” At the same time, the novel exposes how the tacit ideology enslaves people in the postindustrial society of spectacle from the perspective of Guy Debord. All in all, Barnes’s critique of the imagined national identity in England, England is not to deny the existence of Englishness, but to distinguish the imagined and the genuine.

Keywords: Englishness, society of spectacle, hyperreal, Julian Barnes

Author: Chen Su, Associate Professor, School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China.