"Nostalgia For Shanghai" In The View Of Aesthetic Modernity

With the development of social modernization, science and technology developed rapidly, our daily life has changed rapidly, urbanite faced with the experience of the rupture of tradition, the fragmentation of individual survival, lots of dilemmas of human existence and spiritual crisis brought by the rapid development of modernity. The rapid development of science, rationality and technology fully explored the subjectivity of human existence, but people’s personal sense of happiness had never been promoted at the same time. The conventional concept of human existence had been so fundamentally shaken that "at no other time in history people are so confused with themselves like this". In this context, the aesthetic modernity has been produced to confront with the "tool rational" in the western theory fields.From the view point of this theory, the present paper views the essence of "Nostalgia for Shanghai" as one instinct desire caused by the experience of the nihilist of the meaning and the deficient of emotional experience. It is Shanghai people’s self-defense mechanisms to balance their spiritual development, to seek certainty of life, to seek the historical continuity of individual existence. The present paper excavated the connotation of "Nostalgia for Shanghai" through the classification of the subject and the forms of "Nostalgia for Shanghai"; explored the practical roots and psychological roots of "Nostalgia for Shanghai "; discussed the positive effects of "Nostalgia for Shanghai", like the historical continuity of individual existence, the depth and the ultimate meaning of life and so on, through the analysis of the aesthetic connotation and the essence of aesthetic modernity of "Nostalgia for Shanghai"; and further explored the positive role "Nostalgia for Shanghai" played in the process of Shanghai’s modernization and internationalization.