Towards
Critical Flânerie in Chinese Literature:
Spatial
Practices, New Visuality and Moral Tolerance in Shanghai Modernists
Yingjin
ZHANG
Professor
of Chinese and Comparative Literature, UC-San Diego, USA
This
paper aims at a critical reassessment of the flâneur as a troubling
"figure"
in relation to the works and lifestyles of Shanghai modernists (or
new
perceptionists) from the late 1920s to the late 1930s. I will first
discuss
Leo Lee's "troubling" usage of the flâneur in Shanghai Modern and
raise
methodological issues in comparative literature and cultural history.
I
will then survey recent theoretical work on the reconfiguration of the
flâneur
as a character, a metaphor and a concept in studies of modernity and
postmodernity.
The
bulk of the paper deals with Shanghai modernists such as Hei Ying, Liu
Na'ou,
Mu Shiying, Shi Zhicun, and Ye Lingfeng.
I foreground these
writers'
particular--indeed--peculiar ways of articulating a new kind of
urban
experience and argue that they imagine themselves as flâneurs walking
through
exotic Shanghai cityscapes in search of shock and stimulation.
Flânerie
thus provides them with critical spatial practices whereby they
explore
the ephemeral nature of chance encounters with the enigmatic and the
unpredictable
on urban streets. Flânerie also
furnishes a self-sufficient
textual
space in which they negotiate their knowledge of Chinese and foreign
literature
and experiment with (typo)graphic visuality as a new means of
capturing
metropolitan sights/sites, sounds and other sensations.
Furthermore,
flânerie offers a rare but much needed tactic of moral
tolerance
with which they justify their frequent blurring of ideological and
political
boundaries in their struggle to bypass, if not transcend, literary
controversies
of the time. In conclusion, I suggest
that critical flânerie
as
technique and concept has returned in contemporary Chinese literature.