City Poetry

Compared with the extraordinary achievements of the "country literature" in China in the twentieth century and its influence on the world,the development of "city literature" in China has not been able to solve it.Even in the social context of China’s vigorous urbanization process at the end of the last century,"city writing" appears to have failed to succeed compared to economic development,and to an large extent excellent,"city writing" can be regarded as a measure of an important ruler of national modernity.It is particularly important to explore what is the good city literature and narrative under the context.Based in certain a similarity between history and social condition,the thesis selects four Later-modern city literature works of different country and region for case study,and bids to discuss the question of "how a city is depicted" in a specific case analysis.V.S.Naipaul’s Miguel Street presents the profound impact of the spatial environment of Miguel Street on the destiny of people through the unique narrative of a large number of ordinary individuals living at the bottom.Pamuk Orhan’s Istanbul:A City’s Memories,a non-fiction work,presents the history and present of the people in the city through the author’s gaze and city roaming.My City written by Xixi analyses the people in fantasy through the writing of young people and middle-aged people in Hong Kong in the 1970s,discussing the importance of "imagination" in urban literature and the new aesthetic experience.Jin Yucheng’s Blossom makes use of speech,through two-line narrative and market expression,discussing how the destiny of the individual in the city is integrated with the times and history.In the analysis of four different cases,the thesis holds a view that the excellence of city narrative is not to describe a city without human beings,but to describe a city with people presenting their fate in a certain modern civilized space.Sometimes,the description of cities in a literature way can even surpass the observation of sociology,reflecting a kind of "sociological imagination".All of these concepts help us to observe the limitations and shortcomings of current Chinese city writing more clearly,and also have an important value that can’t be underestimated to expand the ideological horizon of Chinese city literature.