英文摘要
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This paper discusses the role the concept of nostalgia plays in Ming-Yi Wu's The Illusionist on Skywalk and Other Short Stories. As the setting is Chunghwa Market Bazaar, a Taipei landmark full of the sense of the past, the story radiates the aura of nostalgia by depicting the "life experience of origins" unique to old cities; it also reminds many readers of their collective memories about the 1960s and 70s. Notably, though Chunghwa Market Bazaar serves as a site of nostalgia in this novel, Wu does not focus on providing detailed descriptions of this location. In fact, we can even construe the "Market Bazaar" as any other fictitious marketplace. The abundant surrealistic elements in the storylines implicitly point to the anxiety of city life reflected by contemporary urban legends. From this perspective, we have reasons to suspect if the novel is not as nostalgic as it appears to be. This paper therefore takes the concept of nostalgia as a point of departure to explore how Wu's novel, without being confined by the conventions of nostalgic writings, conveys a different kind of nostalgic feelings that is capable of catalyzing deeper reflections on the evolution of contemporary cities and the vicissitudes of urban culture. To achieve this goal, I will introduce Sharon Zukin's theory of authentic urban places as well as Steve Hinchliffe's geographies of nature to further explain how the boundaries between past and future, time and space, nature and human practices, can actually be redrawn. In short, I contend that by reconstructing a different space-time of nostalgia, Wu's novel lead us to reject any easy dichotomies and learn to appreciate the ambiguities and even the chaotic from a pluralistic perspective.
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