Rebuilding "Shanghai Modern

In the 1990 s,and especially since the turn of the century,the waves of globalization and urbanization as well as the structural adjustment of China’s urban and rural areas in the era of Reform and Opening Up,have led to the rise of metropolises throughout Chinese mainland as represented by ’Bei,Shang,Guang,and Shen’(Beijing,Shanghai,Guangzhou,and Shenzhen).The urban question has naturally become an important issue in Chinese modernity.It means social transformations,reconfigurations,changes and modifications to the daily life.These transformations,reconfigurations,changes,and modifications have inevitably brought about new urban feelings and experiences,generating new urban practices while giving rise to literary imaginations and expressions that consider the new city as an aesthetic object.Since the opening up of the city in 1943,the modernity of Shanghai is a history of modern urban narratives.Different historical stages have different themes and logics of modernity,producing different yet continuously fluid ’Shanghai city texts’.Looking at the history of modern urban narratives in Shanghai,there are at least two historical periods,one being the 1930-1945 period of imperialist colonial expansion according to Li Orfan’s "Shanghai Modern",and the other being the era of reform and opening up,initiated by the ’Shanghai Revival’ in the age of globalization in which Shanghai provided the quintessential cosmopolitan ’urban text’."In the 1930 s,Shanghai was named "Paris of the East" by the Western world.Similarly,CNN’s coverage of the 2001 APEC meeting in Shanghai described the city standing at the threshold of a new century as "Shanghai reasserting its glamour as the ’Paris of the East’ ".It is worth noting that these seemingly identical comparisons and perceptions represent different ways in which Shanghai relates to and identifies with the world.The Shanghai Urban Master Plan of 2001 discreetly and understatedly set out to plan and build a "modern international metropolis".In the same year,Shanghai joined WTO.The extent of Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism in 2001 is yet to be discussed in-depth,but one thing is certain: this time Shanghai’s ’modern cosmopolitanism’ is a self-named and self-identified initiative to integrate itself into a globalized world."Shanghai Modern" defines the opening and development of Pudong in the1990 s as the "Shanghai Renaissance".Since it is a ’renaissance’,there must be a previous history of a ’renaissance’ to make sense of the reference.In this way,the historical logic of the Shanghai of 1930-1945 and the Shanghai of the Reform and Opening Era is established in its totality and continuity.With a slight adjustment,the dissertation moves the starting point of the ’Shanghai renaissance’ from the late 1980 s,as defined in Shanghai Modern,to the beginning of China’s reform and opening up in the late 1970 s,placing the process of Shanghai’s modernization and cosmopolitanism in the context of the overall history of China’s reform and opening up.It is in this sense that the ’Shanghai Revival’ is understood as the ’re-creation of Shanghai Modern’.Both ’revival’ and ’re-creation’ in the thesis emphasize the inter-viewing and dialogue between the two historical periods of the city.Rather than being confined to the twin-city story of Hong Kong and Shanghai described in Shanghai Modern,the thesis connects and narrates the twin-city story of "Shanghai" with "Shanghai".It is hoped that based on the identification and explication of Shanghai’s mixed modernity and modern urbanity,and through the inter-viewing and dialogue between "Shanghai" and "Shanghai",this paper will explore and reveal the literary narratives of Shanghai’s modern urban narratives.The object and focus of the thesis is the renaissance and literature of Shanghai in the 1980 s and 1990 s,using the Shanghai of 1930-1945 as a reference point.The main part consists of four chapters that are intrinsically and logically related.The first chapter is entitled "The Mosaic City of Shanghai and ’Shanghai Modern’".Based on the logic of the history of the city’s mutual construction and literature in a holistic and continuous manner as implied by "revival" and "reconstruction","Shanghai Modern " reveals a new urban culture and literature during 1930-1945.This is both a historical starting point and a reference point for the city and literature during the "Shanghai Revival" in the 1980 s and 1990 s.Rather than using "Shanghai Modern" as a self-evident conclusion,the thesis redraws the mosaic city of Shanghai by reconstructing the historical logic of Shanghai modernity;it analyzes the theoretical background,value position and research paradigm of Li Orfan’s "Shanghai Modern " by reviewing its academic history.On this basis,"Shanghai Modern" is read in the context of a whole "family" of academic research findings,with the values and limitations of ’Shanghai Modern’ being reexamined and reconsidered from a contemporary perspective.This chapter can be understood as a "re-creation of Shanghai Modern" that cleans up the research site and academic resources.The second chapter is entitled "Modern Dispersal and Shanghai Revival".This chapter takes the re-examination of ’Shanghai Modern’ in the previous chapter as the starting point for the reconstruction of Shanghai Modern 1930-1945,and then examines the continuation and derivation of Shanghai Modern.Unlike "Shanghai Modern",the thesis argues that the post-1949 socialist Shanghai urban space had its own complexity and richness,and that the post-1945 period,especially from 1949 to the beginning of the ’Shanghai Revival’,was not,as Li Oufan claims,a dissipation and loss of Shanghai Modern,but rather a dispersal,transformation and preservation of Shanghai Modern in various ways.Therefore,this chapter and the first chapter can be interpreted as a concise intergenerational history of Shanghai’s modernity,from its boom to its dispersion and revival,with "Modernity" as its center.It can also be seen as a kind of "re-creation of Shanghai Modern".This chapter focuses on the development of Pudong in the 1990 s and the imaginary of Shanghai in the era of globalization,the production of urban space and the reconstruction of class in the process of Shanghai’s renaissance,with attention to the production of urban media space represented by "Shanghai Weekly" and "The Bund",as well as the symptoms of the times implied by cultural events such as the "Eileen Chang fever",the "humanistic spirit" debate,the "Yu Qiuyu phenomenon" and "Shanghai nostalgia".The third chapter of the thesis,’Textual Replacement and Pioneering Literary Revival’,and the fourth chapter,’Retelling Shanghai and Recreating Modernity’,are a study in the literary imagination of “recreating Shanghai Modernity” during the’Shanghai Revival’ period.The third chapter,in which the textual displacement and pioneering literary practices of Shanghai’s return to the world literary map in the1980 s are traced and presented,charts the modernist literary landscape and possibilities of the ’weakly urbanized’ city from various perspectives,including the publication of monographs and articles,and literary community.It reminds us that in the 1980 s Shanghai was undergoing a "reinvention of Shanghai Modern",and that the city and literature were not as simultaneously present and mutually constructed as we might have thought.In the 1980 s,the “weakly urbanized"city "Shanghai" and the"maritime" mirage of modernist literary p"rosperity constitute a curious contrast,and the thesis restores the "textual displacement" of the Shanghai modernist literature in the 1980 s and the "pioneering experiments" to "recreate Shanghai Modern".In contrast,the literary practices of Sun Ganlu,Wang Anyi,and the "New Citizens’ Novels" of the 1990 s,analyzed in Chapter 4 through a close reading of the texts,are a"revival" and "re-creation" of the city and literature that took place in Shanghai in tandem.The "rejuvenation" and "reconstruction" of the city and literature went hand in hand.In terms of the literature,"Recreating Shanghai Modern" is a historical retelling of Shanghai’s nostalgia and roots,as well as a realistic expression of the dreams of the new middle class in both historical and practical terms.Wang An-yi’s novels such as "The Long Hate Song” provide classic texts for "recreating Shanghai Modern",with particular attention to this persistent theme in Wang’s novels since the1990s: how pre-1949 Shanghai participated in the new Shanghai’s ’Republican Memory’? Wang An-yi draws on the history of Shanghai’s ordinary people to write a microcosmic,personal epic of the city.The thesis shows a complex picture of the ways in which Shanghai’s urban narratives and urban literary narratives are related and imaginatively constructed.It can be as co-temporal and symmetrical as in the embedding and mutual construction of city and literature in the Shanghai of the 1930s-1945 and mid-late 1990 s,or as the pioneering literary experiments of modernist literary practitioners in 1980 s in a’weakly urbanized’ Shanghai,which portrayed the development and opening up of Pudong before the ’maritime mirage’ of cosmopolitanism that came earlier than the opening of Pudong.As far as modern Chinese literature is concerned,it goes without saying that modern China has developed a mature aesthetic logic,aesthetic forms and a rural literary tradition of classical texts.And while the literary imagination and expression of the city as an aesthetic object has been present throughout the history of modern Chinese literature,its overall performance is indeed inferior to that of rural literature.Just as the thesis concludes: Shanghai,the only city that has encountered Chinese modernity in its entirety,is both Chinese and global.Why does it not produce a narrative history of great literature that matches the narrative history of this great city? In a certain sense,the city predates the countryside and is more fully and profoundly modern than the countryside,but the fact of the matter is that there is an objective imbalance between urban and rural literary production and research,such that the study of cities and urban literature,including Shanghai,will be an important topic for the future of modern Chinese literary research.