"Shanghai Dance" Post-modern Characteristics

Brian. Castro is a famous ethnic writer in Australian literature.With the descent of Chinese, English and Portuguese, he was deeplyaffected by multicultural and also the family background. His writingapproach is unique and creative, and most of his works are closelylinked with China.“Shanghai Dance” is Castro’s seventh novel, whichis a fictional autobiography, and its content is a story of the heroreturned from Australia to China to pursue the family history. As amodernist writer, Castro was known as “high modernism”, and hisworks not only continue the modernism but also blend thepost-modernism. This paper attempts to analyze the post-modernismcharacteristic of the “Shanghai Dance” using the post-modernismtheory.There are three parts in this paper, which are introduction, bodyand conclusion. Introduction includes four parts, in which the firstand the second parts are a brief introduction of the work; the thirdpart is the researches from abroad and at home about Castro; the lastpart describes the research value and methods of “Shanghai Dance”.The body part is divided into three chapters. The first chapteranalyzes the text by uncertainty characteristic, primarily by theuncertainty on the plot, uncertainty on the character, uncertainty onthe language and uncertainty on the theme to interpret the text, which is in order to reflect the openness of the text. The secondchapter discusses the characteristics of the text fragments, andmainly to explore the effect produced through the text fragment andthe fragmentation art to reveal the fiction of the text. The thirdchapter starts from the collage method, which mainly talks about theuse of the picture collage, genre collage, structure collage, andlanguage collage.The last part is a conclusion of this paper. In this paper, the authoranalyzes the text to explore the novel’s characteristics of uncertainty,fragmentation, and collage to prove Castro’s works’ post-modernism.He devoted himself to literary innovation, and also created a lot ofoutstanding works; what is more, his creative techniques make surethat he can go further on the literary path.