| Space crisis is the source of all the crises that Chinese people have encountered since the late Qing Dynasty.The establishment of concessions in China by westerners is an important symbol of space crisis.Shanghai is the first concession city in China,and also the first westernized and internationalized city.With the establishment of the concession,the Westerners began to implement the urban space transformation plan for Shanghai.Building streets and improving street network are the primary tasks of urban space transformation.With the formation of modern streets in Shanghai,the pattern of street network is becoming more and more mature,and the traditional state of Shanghai urban space is disappearing gradually.In this way,the construction of modern streets has triggered a large-scale spatial change in Shanghai.In David Harvey's words,this is a "creative destruction" means,which shows Shanghai's determination to completely break with the tradition.Shanghai began to appear in front of Chinese people in a "modern" manner.Shanghai street is an imitation of western city street.The Westerners living in the concession transplanted their own street construction experience to China.The perfect concession streets satisfy the daily life of urbanites,provide people with good sensory experience,and become the "stimulus source" for Chinese people to imagine western material civilization.In the relevant records of Shanghai tourists at that time,"street experience" became one of the important criteria for them to judge whether the city is civilized or not.In contrast to concession streets,old town streets have become a "negative" existence.Therefore,in order to improve the city's appearance and image,the old city streets began to imitate the concession streets.The crisis in space can trigger the collapse of the whole social order.Street is the most important public space in a city,which has many functions.Space is not a simple material combination,but also a place where deep cultural memory is condensed.The transformation of Shanghai street from tradition to modernization means the transformation of spatial cultural memory.On the intuitive level,the emergence of modern streets has changed the original order of water towns in Shanghai.The rhythm of urban daily life has changed from slow to fast,and from static to dynamic.The dramatic changes in space changed the perception structure of urban people.In the literary works at that time,streets were repeatedly written,especially the No.4 Road,Nanjing Road,Avenue Joffre,North Sichuan Road,etc.They represent a modern way of life to meet the daily life of the public,which has been widely recognized.In Shanghai,streets give people a unique urban aesthetic experience.This is the exotic.When people shuttle through the streets of Shanghai,they seem to be in a foreign country.However,there is a deep colonial crisis behind the exotic sentiment.Shanghai street is not only a westernized space,but also a colonial space.Behind the seemingly civilized street,there is a profound colonial crisis.Although the colonial violence incarnates the exotic sentiment,it can't disguise its colonial ambition.Therefore,the Shanghai people walking on the Nanjing Road are not only feeling the exotic sentiment,but also the objects directly controlled by the colonial power.Especially,in modern Shanghai,building streets is not only a municipal affair,but also a game between different power unions.Because of this,the Chinese authorities expressed their nationalist demands by building streets.As the external space of the city,street is also related to the traditional gender.The gender order of " The man goes out to work while the woman looks after the house " is the foundation of the traditional social order.If it is reversed and disordered,it will affect the stability of the whole country.But in Shanghai,women walking on the streets have changed the traditional pattern of gender order.Women practice their gender and political appeals in the public space of street.In this way,the streets of modern Shanghai are a complex,pluralistic and ambiguous urban space,which is out of order while establishing a new order.Based on this,"space" and "order" can be regarded as the key words to understand the modern transformation of Shanghai streets.Street is not a stable structure,but a constantly changing space.The transmutation first took place on the level of material space.The first chapter of this thesis will combine the history of modern Shanghai city and the literary texts at that time to investigate the modern transformation of Shanghai street and how the modern street after transformation affects literary creation.In Shanghai,if the streets want to develop,they must break through some practical obstacles,such as the rivers and the city walls.It is an important measure for modern transformation of streets in Shanghai to build roads by filling the river and demolishing the old city walls.However,in Shanghai,rivers and city walls are not only the street landscapes,but also the symbols of traditional Chinese culture.They are also related to the cultural psychological structure of traditional Chinese people.It can be seen from the controversy among people with different opinions caused by the demolition of the wall in the late Qing Dynasty and the early Republic of China.After the disappearance of the rivers and the city wall,the broad streets were replaced,which indicated that Shanghai gradually broke away from the order of local China and began to adapt to a new order of exclusive modern cities.In addition,the construction of roads across the boundary is also an important measure.The construction of roads across the boundary was carried out under the leadership of the concession authorities.However,"road building" is not the purpose of this measure,"crossing the boundary" is the essence.Modern Shanghai is a city with mixed Chinese and foreign cultures.The spatial crossing is,in essence,the invasion of concession power to China.Therefore,building roads across the boundary is a means of colonial expansion in the concession,and the streets formed therefrom are the products of colonial expansion.The change of external space will naturally affect the creation of literature.In the literary works with Shanghai as the background since the late Qing Dynasty,the modern Shanghai street is not only the description object of the works,but also one of the important components of the text space.In the ancient city novels,the street of the city is not likely to be the constituent factor of the text space,on the contrary,the street as the daily life space of the city is often ignored.Modern streets participate in the construction of text space and become the most important part of text space.To some extent,it is one of the important signs of the transformation from ancient novels to modern novels.The transmutation of the street in space is intuitive,that is to say,it is visible and touchable,which can be directly perceived by human senses.When the writer is creating,he will often mix the experience given by the street into his creation.In this way,modern streets also provide new writing experience and skills for the creation of literary texts.The second chapter of this thesis will explain how modern streets affect the order of urban daily life.Street is the space of daily life of urban residents,and people living in the city are always in contact with the street.Shanghai Street constructs a new space-time of modern city.Compared with the daily space-time order of traditional streets,this new space-time is deformed and disciplined by power.Streetlights and vehicles are the most important accessories of modern streets and the material representation of street civilization.But their existence makes the internal spatial structure of the street deformed at the same time.Streetlights extend the time that people stay in the street,and their existence makes the street a day and night reversed time and space.Vehicle speed as a medium makes the street become a compressed space-time,flowing space-time and superimposed space-time.Streetlights and vehicles make urban daily life a modern legend.Patrol police is an important configuration of modern streets,which indicates that the streets as a public space begin to accept the discipline of power,and the daily life of the city is trapped in a huge power network.Modern streets have changed the daily life of Shanghai citizens.Modern city is a place of material gathering.People's desire gets rid of the shackles of daily ethics and morality under the stimulation of material,and starts to seek for normal expression.Therefore,the street becomes the expression space of citizens' daily life desire.It is worth noting that a daily leisure sport based on streets has sprung up in modern Shanghai,that is,"swing the road".The so-called "swing the road" means walk."Swing the road" is an important means for the public to understand modern Shanghai,and it is the interaction between people and the city.People not only accept the constraints of modern urban space-time order,but also change this order by the way of walking.Shanghai is under the feet of the public so that it gains its significance.Modern and revolution are the key words to understand modern Shanghai urban culture.The third chapter of this thesis will explain the Shanghai Street in the left-wing discourse from the relationship between modern and revolution.The word "modern" is rich in meaning.It has a direct relationship with modern material consumption in Shanghai in the 1930 s.Therefore,the modern street shaped by material culture can also be regarded as a modern space.When left-wing scholars walk in this modern space,they will naturally have a pleasant sensory experience.But class consciousness prevented them from further indulging in it.In the left-wing discourse,Shanghai street is a world of polarization.The urban poor and proletarians are oppressed by the colonists and the upper class.They are excluded from this modern space.The narrative of Shanghai street of left-wing literati has a strong sense of contrast.In order to seek space justice,Shanghai street was used as a revolutionary practice space.Demonstrations,street speeches,leaflets and slogans,the revolutionary activities in the streets of Shanghai are not only the negation of the existing urban spatial order,but also the means of rewriting the memory of urban space.The fourth chapter of this thesis will explain how Shanghai women use the spatial characteristics of modern streets to subvert the traditional gender order under the background of modern women's Liberation Movement in China from the relationship between space and body.Street is the outer space of the city,so it is also a male space from the perspective of gender.In the traditional society,the streets refuse women.Specifically,rejecting women actually rejects their bodies.But the streets of modern Shanghai have become the exhibition space of women's bodies.From prostitutes in the late Qing Dynasty to modern women and revolutionary women in the 1930 s,the streets of Shanghai are more colorful because of their existence.On the one hand,women walking in the street can not avoid being stared at and materialized by men.On the other hand,she is also writing about women's urban experience in her own way.In order to adjust the relationship between self body,street(public space)and men,women under the great demands of national interests in the 1930 s took the initiative to accept the code of revolution,hide their femininity,and try to close the gap between the two sexes with a political body and a revolutionary body.Since the late Qing Dynasty,the modern transformation of Shanghai streets has been a drastic process of spatial evolution.This thesis starts with "space" and "order" and then explain in detail how the old order was subverted and how the new order to be established from three aspects of urban daily life,left wing and gender in a changing space by combining with modern Shanghai urban history,urban culture and urban literature. |
PDF Full Text Request