Discipline And Transgression-a Study Of Urban Narratives Of Morning In Shanghai

Morning in Shanghai is one of the very few long novels in the Seventeen Years’ Literature that takes the city as its subject matter.It covers all aspects of the city’s political economy,social culture,class relations and daily life.Since its publication,however,critical attention has tended to focus on the novel’s theme ideas and characters,and it has received far less attention than the literary works of its contemporaries that portrayed towering heroes and wrote about heroic deeds.In addition,the author’s creation is strongly political and utilitarian,which makes the novels have a clear intention of "theme first",resulting in the urban landscape,urban daily life and urban characters in the works being often interpreted in a simplistic and political way by scholars and readers.Through a close reading of the text,the author finds that the urban writing of Morning in Shanghai is,on the one hand,very conscious of its ideological stance,but on the other hand,due to the richness of its literary images,it displays a certain complexity that escapes from the framework of the grand narrative.And beneath the surface of the revolutionary text,there are also narrative dilemmas that are difficult to stitch together in a rigid grand narrative.Moreover,the urban life and characters that the author criticized at the time in the novel regain aesthetic power in the cultural context of today.This thesis intends to interpret the richness and complexity of the city in which Shanghai in Morning is written from multiple perspectives,taking the city narrative as a perspective,and then reveal the contradictions between political narrative and literary aesthetics in its creation,and further explore the ideological and artistic value of the novel.This thesis is divided into three parts: the introduction,the body and the conclusion.The introductory part of the thesis is devoted to explaining the reason for choosing the topic and the significance of the research,sorting out the academic research results about Morning in Shanghai,and explaining the research method and innovation of the article.The main text is divided into four chapters:The first chapter compares the background to the creation of Morning in Shanghai,covering the historical context in which the novel was written and the writer’s creative philosophy,thereby helping people to understand the atmosphere and ideological overtones of the time in which the novel represents the city,and to discover the unique aspects and meanings of the city narrated in the text.The second chapter analyses the performance of the novel’s urban narrative from the perspective of mainstream narrative conventions,which can be summarized as "Shanghai narrative under the discipline of revolutionary discourse",a manifestation of the author’s conscious compliance with mainstream ideology in three aspects: narrative logic,narrative strategy and aesthetic purpose.The third chapter reveals the contradictions and gaps in the urban narrative under the discipline of revolutionary discourse,which greatly interfere with the novel’s grand narrative discourse and make the writing of the city in the text complex.The text discusses two aspects: firstly,the contradiction between the discourse of power,the spirit of the city and the "human being" as a subject;secondly,the text’s expression of urban life has a sense of reality,especially the depiction of the complex living conditions and interpersonal interactions in the city.Chapter four concludes the significance of the study of the urban narrative of Morning in Shanghai: firstly,by analyzing the various contradictions and gaps presented in the narrative process,the tension of the novel’s narrative is explored,and the aesthetic value of the text is further explored;secondly,on the basis of fully exploring the artistic value of the novel,the special significance of the novel for contemporary urban literature is explored by placing it in the context of the development of urban literature in New China.The concluding section summaries the main ideas of the text and provides a summary and sublimation of the novel’s ideological and artistic value.