Oppression,Rebellion And Coexistence:Urban Landscape In In The Country Of Last Things

As the winner of the Spanish Asturias Prize for Literature in 2006,Paul Auster(1947-)is considered one of the most distinguished and innovative writers in contemporary American literary field.Most of his works are set in the city to express his great concern over urban space and city dwellers as well as the relation between the city itself and urban development.Since the publication of The New York Trilogy,Auster has been a prominent urban novelist to present city and something associated with urban space.In the Country of Last Things,written in epistolary style,is his second urban novel.This novel mainly depicts what a group of nobodies suffer and how they struggle for existence unremittingly in a post-apocalyptic metropolis.More importantly,it also indicates the potential order and stability hidden in the city,which is usually taken to be in chaos.The thesis takes theories of new cultural geography,chaos theory and other relevant literary theories.Based on close reading of the text,the thesis attempts to analyze how the novel presents the oppression of urban landscape on individuals,how oppressed individuals rebel against the city through the productivity of landscape and how marginalized groups pursue multi-cultural coexistence by the construction of ideal landscape of dwelling,all of which are helpful to understand better Paul Auster’s unique urban writing and provide inspiration for the current urban development globally.According to the theory of cultural geography,"landscape" not only refers to the physical landscape available to viewers but also acts as a rich,complicated and cultural signifier closely associated with ideological practice,through which we may take a clear-cut stand to observe the world and its working mechanism.Apart from Introduction and Conclusion,this thesis is made up of three parts that respectively focuses on cultural implications of political landscape,cultural landscape and dwelling landscape.The introduction part mainly sketches out Paul Auster and his literary achievements especially in urban writing in the past twenty years,gives a literature review of studies of the writer and his fictional writings both at home and abroad,and meanwhile expounds the theoretical framework of the present thesis as well as its studying significance.The first chapter explores how the political landscape presents power relation in which National Library in the novel has been reduced to an appendage of power on account of the"cleanup project" and the omnipresent toll stations are taken as the intensive representation of the desire for power,exploiting individuals wantonly.Besides,callous transformation centers are taken to be important mediums to achieve authoritative discourse from the government and ride roughshod over laws and human rights.The second chapter reveals how the cultural landscape presents the rebellion against power and authorities.Faced with constant suppression and enslavement,nobodies in the city rise up against power oppression to deconstruct the mainstream society by means of building up ship models,constructing bisexual love and joining in assassination clubs.The third chapter analyzes how the dwelling landscape reveals the city and dwellers to be in harmonious coexistence.In order to achieve the sense of belonging,these expelled foreigners and homeless ones call for a boycott of the widespread apathy,trying to build multi-cultural communities in the alien culture and create order and stability out of disorder.In terms of the concept of "landscape",the thesis attempts to illustrate the predicament of urban development and the difficulties existing in the relation between the city and city dwellers through the discussion of different types of urban landscape.In modern civilization,city is indispensable in the process of human development.To a great extent,only when the binary opposition between city and dwellers is deconstructed and the role that the city plays in the process of modern civilization is looked upon objectively,could the healthy-developed city become.It should also be pointed out that the so-called "cending" in the city of last things mentioned in the novel doesn’t mean that the city would be lost in utter darkness or developed with an absolute chaos.In fact,the city is a complex and dynamic system in which the exchange of order and disorder could exist.Exactly,disorder could produce order and vice versa.Such is the significance and inspiration for us readers to make a study of Paul Auster and his urban novel.