Configurations of the city in modern Chinese literature and film.

摘要

This dissertation investigates configurations of the city in modern Chinese literature and film at two levels: (1) at the textual level, we analyze various discursive strategies of imaging or imagining the city; (2) at the conceptual level, we differentiate a number of intellectual schematas and their complex relationships with other socio-historical discourses that shape urban configurations.; The prologue situates the dissertation in Chinese cultural history and specifies our objectives. Chapter 1 works toward a concept of the narrator as a site of differance through a close reading of Shi Tuo's The Orchard Town and proposes a paradigm (the histoire des mentalites) for modem Chinese literary studies. After a survey of cultural landscapes of China's small town, three typical configurations of the city--space, time, and gender--are used to structure the remaining three chapters.; Chapter 2 travels through four Beijing novels in the early twentieth century and maps out the "imageability" of the old capital. Drawing extensively on Lao She, we visualize Beijing as a traditional city characterized by gentry mentalities and symbolic triumph of Chinese tradition. The interlude touches on the controversy over Beijing and Shanghai trends, thereby preparing for striking contrasts between the two cities.; Focusing on Shanghai narratives from the 1890s to the 1930s, Chapter 3 discusses the process of temporalization of space, the workings of money in literary imagination (Mao Dun and Cao Yu), and the textual inscription of urban chaos (the "New Perceptionists"). Turning from time to gender, Chapter 4 offers critical readings of cinematic and literary configurations of "modern women" in the 1930s and 1940s (Tian Han, Ye Lingfeng, Ku Xu, Eileen Chang, and Su Qing), tackling in gender-specific terms the questions of sexuality, asceticism, voyeurism, fetishism, sadism, dandyism, as well as the interplay between feminization and masculinization.; The epilogue presents a historical survey of problematizations of city and country from the 1900s to the 1930s, and the increasing politicization of intellectual quests since the 1940s. We conclude the dissertation with a brief reflection on the cultural trend of "roots searching" in the late 1980s, which reproblematizes the issues of country and city in modern China.