Seven Senses of the City: Urban Spacetime and Sensory Memory in Contemporary Sinophone Fiction

Seven Senses of the City: Urban Spacetime and Sensory Memory in Contemporary Sinophone Fiction
Astrid Møller-Olsen

Summary

What happens when the city you live in changes over night? When the streets and neighborhoods that form the material counterpart to your mental soundtrack of memory suddenly cease to exist? The rapidly changing cityscapes of Taipei, Hong Kong and Shanghai form an environment of urban flux that cause such questions to surface in literary texts. Furthermore, the historical hybridity and linguistic polyphony of these three cities, defy attempts at simple nostalgia and produce narratives that explore past and present, here and there, as co-constitutive elements of the same urban experience.
In this dissertation, I analyze how contemporary fictional works from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Taipei narrate the complex relationship between body, memory and cityscape. Through a focus on reimagined and metaphorically extended sensory modes that I call literary sensory studies, I engage with themes of scented nostalgia, flavors in fiction, walking as method, literary cartography, the melody of language, gendered cityscapes, metafictional dreams and rhythmic senses of time. More generally, this study shows how contemporary cities change the way we think about time, space and memory, as well as how we make sense of such changes through narrative.

Author

Astrid Møller-Olsen

PhD defended at

Lund University, The Joint Faculties of Humanities and Theology, Centre for Languages and Literature

Specialisation

Humanities

Region

Taiwan
Hong Kong
China

Theme

Diasporas and Migration
Environment
Gender and Identity
Health and Medicine
Literature
Urban / Rural