City Images Of Dublin And Hong Kong In Joyce’s Ulysses And Liu Yichang’s Jiu Tu--From The Perspective Of Flaneur

James Joyce and Liu Yichang, one being an occidental master on modernist fiction and the other a well-known Hong Kong writer, are famous for their inimitable stream-of-consciousness writing technique in English and Chinese literature respectively.Born in Dublin. Ireland, Joyce sets his hometown in his fictions with special linguistic style and anti-traditional writing techniques. Though Joyce is not a prolific writer and he writes no more than six works in all his life, each of his works is a long-lasting canon. Ulysses, one of Joyce’s literary masterpieces, represents the literary peak of stream-of-consciousness technique, and is laurelled as "encyclopedia of modern society". Taking parallel plot structures to Homeric epic - Odyssey, Joyce adopts stream-of-consciousness writing technique and has his Ulysses chronicles the passage through Dublin by its main protagonists, Leopold Bloom, as well as Stephen and Molly, during an ordinary day, June 16, 1904. Ulysses thoroughly reveals modern city dwellers’ loneliness, paralysis, and frustrated sentiment toward their urban lives. With panoramic and detailed descriptions for Dublin, Ulysses vividly presents the city images of Dublin to readers and makes Dublin unforgettable in readers’ memory.Liu Yichang is the first writer who combines Chinese aesthetic tradition and western stream-of-consciousness technique to write Chinese-featured stream of consciousness fictions. Jin Tu, published in 1963, is such a successful fiction and it gains the credit as the first Chinese fiction with stream of consciousness writing technique. The background of Jiu Tu is the Hong Kong society in 1960s. It is a money-ruled and commoditized society which doesn’t offer any foothold for serious literary works and arts.Jiu Tu, the protagonist in Jiu Tu, is a well-educated literary writer with profound knowledge on western and eastern literature. After moving to Hong Kong, he has to go against his conscience to write pornographic and Kongfu stories because of living pressure. With the depiction of Jiu Tu’s stream of consciousness and interior monologue, Liu Yichang reveals the conflicting struggle and agony within Jiu Tu.Both fictions adopt stream-of-consciousness technique to expose and depict their protagonists’ inner mental activities. No matter it is Bloom or Stephen in Ulysses and Jiu Tu in Jiu Tu, they all are flaneurs in Dublin and Hong Kong. It is through depicting and revealing flaneurs’ shock experiences, stream of consciousness and interior monologue that Joyce and Liu Yichang present the city images of Dublin and Hong Kong to readers.In eastern and western literary tradition, the image of flaneur is a recurring motif in literary works. The concept and theory on flaneur is firstly systematically brought forth by Walter Benjamin. When he studies the poems of Baudelaire, he concludes that Baudelaire and the protagonists in his works act as flaneurs in Paris. Flaneurs are a group of people who wander around city and observe the city with detached eyes. Flaneurs meet with great shock experiences in modern city. William Wordsworth’s The Prelude gives a detailed depiction to flaneurs’ shock experiences in London and thus presents London’s images to readers. Doubtlessly, flaneur and his shock experiences are closely related to city. Since 1980s, city literature comes to be prosperous. Rechard Lehan pioneeringly brings forth the concept of city image in his work - The City in the Literature. Consequently, city image research becomes a part of literature research. This thesis intends to compare city images represented in Ulysses and Jiu Tu with the help of the concept flaneur.This thesis consists of the following five parts:Chapter one: Introduction. It includes brief introductions to the two fictions -Ulysses and Jiu Tu, literature reviews on present at home and abroad, assumptions, research methods, the objective, as well as the significance of this thesis. Chapter two: Flaneur and City. The concept on flaneur will be reviewed and its relationship with city image research will be elaborated. Then, the relationship between the flaneurs and city images in Ulysses and Jiu Tu will be discussed.Chapter three: City Images in Ulysses. Through studying the fl(a|^)neurs -- Bloom and Stephen’s shock experiences, stream of consciousness and interior monologue, this thesis concludes that Dublin in Joyce’s Ulysses is an oppressed, paralytic and extremely nationalistic city.Chapter Four: City Images in Jiu Tu. Through analyzing Jiu Tu’s shock experiences, stream of consciousness and interior monologue, this thesis has found that Liu Yichang presents a commoditized, erotic and wastelanded Hong Kong image to the readers.Chapter Five: Conclusion. This thesis summarizes the city images represented in Ulysses and Jiu Tu. Besides, this thesis stresses that no matter it is Bloom in Ulysses or Jiu Tu in Jiu Tu, they all are the incarnations of their authors. Joyce and Liu Yichang show their strong subjective sentiment in reconstructing and refiguring the city images of Dublin and Hong Kong in their literary works.