Time And Space:a Postmodern Study Of The Invisible City

As time goes by，human’s culture had developed into the postmodern era. As apostmodern master, Italo Calvino has many works, one of them is the Invisible City.The main part of this book is about cities, and it first brings the conception of “spatialtheory” in the literature. Because of this, the Invisible City is quite influential.Literature is a mirror of time and society, similarly, the Invisible City is a mirror ofpostmodern life. This paper has three perspectives: time, space and the feature ofpostmodern city. The work reveals people’s split personality and exposes manyproblems in postmodern society as time is forgotten by people, space is shattered andover reproduced in each day, cities are full of conflicts. In order to save our spiritualworld and our society, this paper aim to recall people’s attention to restore the realtime and space so that a harmony urban environment could be built.There are three chapters in this paper. The first chapter is about the change ofwestern time concept and the history which written in the Invisible City. Both ofthem are link to postmodern time concept. The second chapter has two points: the“third space” and “postmodern urban feature”. This chapter mainly talks aboutspatial conflicts, consumption, symbols and international style. The third chapter isabout the “fading spatial history” and “collage cities”, which studies the urbanfeature under the background of time and space. The innovation of this paper is theanalysis of time and space in literature, which conforms to the trend of spatial turn.The third chapter is link to the third space theory, which reveals the conflict amonggender and race.