Car: A New Aesthetic Image

Those materials of contemporary society have numbed our feeling. All the common things lose their poetry. So people have been producing myth one by one and the car has became the classic of contemporary materials myth between the description of words and pictures. Those aimed packages make us accepting the surface produced by the media without thinking. The result is ignoring the historic development of car as a cultural image even a literature image.This dissertation is going to show the car in modern literature works represented by school of Shanghai literature. Through three parts: car and the molding of nation; car and city fairy city; car and human beings, we can clearly see before 1901 when the first car came to china, it existed in the meaning of fitting the imagination of self-demand. Even after 1901, the car did not dissolve into our culture life but a representation of a western image. Luckily the drastically competition of market tried to dismiss the difference in nationality and change the car to a pure consumable of common life. From then on, it has catered to Chinese concept of culture and consumption. Through the hard work, the car finally became the leading actor of Chinese city culture, the important scene in citied novels, the horse under those heroes and heroines, the love place provide for them and the ornament producing those heroes and heroines in a new age. At the same time, it is set as a representation of modernity by the industrial thought of logical age. Behind the representation there is the combination between the ideology and industrial watchword. Yet it did not finish the duty of enforcing our country, the consumptive age brought by the occidental changed it into the simulation which is half true and half fake.Of course, the pure literature works can not depict the complicated object, this dissertation using the modern newspaper, magazines and periodicals describes a big historic background and discover the different culture phenomenon from different feelings of main bodies. So that a complicated modern history will take on a new face: filling with the puerility of pre-industrial times, having the freedom of different kinds of culture, having the codes of modern factors.In a word, the car is produced by human beings, wrote by them and finally it became the art representing the mechanical times. It became a history then it has been producing a history. Our concern of this dissertation is the glory of social culture reflected by the car in the history.