On Wearing the City
Resource
中外文學, 34(10), 167-186
Journal
中外文學
Journal Volume
34
Journal Issue
10
Pages
167-186
Date Issued
2006-03
Date
2006-03
Author(s)
Abstract
What would be the possible connection between dressing through the body and walking through the city? How could the space of architecture/ architexture be interwoven with literary narratives?
This paper attempts to think through the “clothed” body-city by exploring the “haptic” experience of wearing, dwelling and walking in urban modernity. It will read through three major texts—Eileen Chang's “The Red Rose and the White Rose,” Tien-wen Chu's “Fin-de-Si?cle Splendor,” and Tien-hsin Chu's “The Ancient Capital”—to map out the spatial text/texture/textile/textuality of both the embodied city and the urbanized corporeality. Instead of following the tradition of urban literature which tends to read the city as chiefly the “abstract” background of the rural/urban confrontation, national identity formation or global homogenization, it endeavors to trace bodily memories and e-motions through the details of habit/habitus/habitation fashioning and fashioned in urban life styles. It will argue that the multiplicity of the body-city fabricated by these three women writers is more a metonymical “surface” of proximity, contiguity and contact than a metaphorical “depth” of similarity, identification and meaning. Its openness and fluidity makes the haptic experience of urban writing and reading a perfect turning of cognitive mapping into sensuous geography, of the represented cityscape into the embodied fashionscape.
Subjects
體感
時尚
世界都會主義
認知繪圖
感官地理
體現
張愛玲
朱天文
朱天心
haptic
fashion
cosmopolitanism
cognitive mapping
sensuous geography
embodiment
Eileen Chang
Tien-wen Chu
Tien-hsin Chu
Type
journal article
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