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Shanghai as “the Rubbish Heap of All Asia”: New Sensationalist Writing, Colonial Metropolis, and Environmental Apocalypse
2017/2018 School of Chinese Research Students Seminar
作為全亞洲的垃圾堆的《上海》：新感覺主義書寫，殖民都市，與環境啟示
Shanghai as “the Rubbish Heap of All Asia”: New Sensationalist Writing, Colonial Metropolis, and Environmental Apocalypse
張墨兮 Zhang Moxi
April 20, 2018 (Friday), 5:30-6:45pm
Room 730, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus
Language: English
1928年，在上海訪問一個月後，橫光利一回東京發表了一系列針對寫作中的語言與形式的新感覺主義文學理論，繼而創作了《上海》作為他的首部長篇小說和最後一部新感覺主義書寫實踐。本報告將《上海》置入橫光的文學理論語境中閱讀，聚焦於書寫與空間的關係。在《上海》中，這一關係因小說人物在殖民都市的旅行而成為可能。區別於慣常的旅行書寫範式，《上海》揭示了一種主體性，它既不佔據“帝國之眼”的位置，也不佔據被放逐的他者的位置。準確的說，這一主體性與空間相互作用，而空間則被呈現為一種城市奇觀。通過將環境作為一個維度置入空間，本報告以生態批評的關懷，關注文本內（如廢棄物）以及文本外（如地震）的非人力結構的喻體。我將論證，在《上海》中，可追溯出後殖民生態暴力的殖民遺產。於此，橫光不僅展示了它與現代性的關係，同時提供了他對現代性的批判。
After his one-month stay in Shanghai in 1928, Yokomitsu Riichi went back to Tokyo and published a series of his New Sensationalist literary theories on language and style in writing. He then wrote Shanghai as his first novel and last practice of New Sensationalist writing. This presentation reads Shanghai in the context of Yokomitsu’s literary theories, focusing on the relationship between writing and space. In Shanghai, the relationship is enabled through the novel’s various characters traveling in the colonial metropolis. Distinct from the conventional paradigms of travel writing, Shanghai reveals a subjectivity that does not take the position either of the “imperial eyes” or of an exiled other. Rather, the subjectivity is interactive with the space presented as a spectacle of urban environment. By bringing environment as a dimension into space, this presentation attends to tropes of non-human agencies both in the text (e.g., waste) and beyond the text (e.g., earthquake) with concerns of ecocriticism. I argue that one can trace inShanghai the colonial legacy of postcolonial ecoviolence, where Yokomitsu both shows its relation to modernity and offers his critique of modernity.
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