The Writings On Shanghai And The "Semi-Colonial" Modernity

In this dissertation,the writings on Shanghai in the modern literature of East Asia will be discussed generally.The writings on Shanghai of China,Japan and Korea(1919-1937)are chosen as the main objects of the research and the images of Shanghai represented by these texts will be summarized.In elucidating the "images",attention will be paid to revealing the attitudes and conceptions that the subject has superimposed on them.The exploration of the"inner aspect" of this subject,mainly with the help of the theories concerning colonial modernity,will analyze the subject's reflection of the "semi-colonial" modernity of Shanghai.Not only the comparisons among the differences of the subjective understandings of colonial modernity in the writings of the three countries will be made,but the common subjective attitude behind the "images" of Shanghai will be summarized.In Chapter ?,the historical reasons why Shanghai during 1920s-30s was portrayed by Chinese,Korean and Japanese writers and even by the whole East Asia intellectuals will be analyzed from a social history perspective.That Shanghai as an East Asia city has continuously attracted the intellectuals from various countries,which was the root cause of the generating of the writings,will be emphasized.Chinese writers came to Shanghai for living,studying and establishing cultural undertakings.Korean intellectuals were exiled to Shanghai because of failed revolution and wrote about Shanghai as "the other" of their motherland.Japanese writers who visited here introduced Shanghai to their countrymen.In Chapter ?,the relations between the Chinese writings on Shanghai and the colonial modernity will be discussed respectively in accordance with the schools of literature of the Shanghai style.The old school,while taking delight in talking about modern urban life,discovered the conflict between modernization and patriotic ethics and began to question the import of modernity of the West.Mu Shiying,a modernist writer,by observing the lower classes' pursuit of modern daily life,emphasized the inequality of modernization under the capitalist production mechanism.Shi Zhecun revealed the modern urban life experience of marginal people within the urban-rural confrontational structure.Leftist writers discovered the colonial nature of modernity through the economical and class analyses.In Chapter ?,the representations of colonial modernity in the Korean "exilic" writers'writings on Shanghai will be analyzed.The basic subjective attitudes behind Shanghai's spatial representation were criticizing colonialism,denouncing pseudo-modernity and lamenting degeneration of morality.Korean intellectuals who have lived in Shanghai treated Shanghai as"the other",reflecting the current colonization and the independence of their motherland while revealing the colonial modernity nature of Shanghai.In Chapter IV,the writings on Shanghai of three Japanese writers who have visited here,Akutagawa Ryunosuke,Muramatsu Syofu,Yokomitsu Riichi,will be investigated,and the"images" of Shanghai written by them will be summarized.Akutagawa,in his travel notes,examined modern Shanghai on a cultural basis and rethought the modernization of East Asia.Muramatsu,through his description of urban life,revealed that Shanghai was "a capital of devil" under the cover of material modernity.Yokomitsu's Shanghai,not only reconsidered the relations between semi-colonial Shanghai,as "the other",and the modernization of Japan,but also rethink the relations between Shanghai,as "the center",and the modernization of China.In the end,the different "images" of Shanghai represented by the writings of the three countries will be observed on the whole,in order to reveal the common subjective attitude behind it and establish the link between the attitude and the semi-colonial city.The writings of three countries all took a dual attitude toward Shanghai.In fact,it was determined by the semi-colonial modernity of the Shanghai city.