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.