A Fictional Biography For The City:a Study Of Isherwood’s Urban Modernity In Goodbye To Berlin

The Anglo-American novelist Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) achieved a measure of success and fame for his novel Goodbye to Berlin, which is about the decay of Weimar Republic Germany and the rise of Nazis in the early 1930s. More often than not, critics focus on the sociopolitical values of this novel, or regard it as a sentimental bildungsroman. Indeed, their studies of political overtones and autobiographical analysis that mainly center on the event of Nazi rise to power have significantly revealed its social and historical significance. However, critics rarely notice the urban aspects in the text with the real modern cityscape and details buried in the plots.Therefore, the present thesis assumes that, if we study the novel from the perspective of urbanism and modernity, in light of biographical study, psychoanalysis, cultural study, and if we expand our attention to Isherwood’s diaries, autobiographies, and other fictions, we can possibly use shared textuality as an entry point to delve into the urban representation and author’s particular literary imagination and aesthetic way approaching the city. It is argued that the "Berlin" in the novel is an imagined, reconceptualized city after Isherwood’s reading of the factual one, filled with his private emotion and metaphorical imagery. And fictional evidences in the Nazi era highlight the whole path of Berlin from a glorious modern metropolis to an entropic wasteland. Thus> we could see this kind of writing as a fictional biography for the city.The thesis begins with an overview of the interconnectedness between the city and the text. Through comparison, it points out the gap between the factual city and the textual city in that Isherwood’s urban representation is strongly colored with his subjective emotion and imagination. And this practice endows the city with a more living sense of reality. It is further argued that the cityscape and modern life presented in Isherwood’s text have double-coded visions, and the rise of Nazi turns the city radically into a modern entropic inferno. Based on the historical and textual studies, this thesis continues to explore the author’s mental responses, aesthetic imagination for the stimulus he experienced in the city, and the urban experience and memories which significantly impact his search for artistic identity.