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立 政 治 大 學
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the next,” and this unification will “undermine the autonomy and quality of places”
(94). In Arcadia, Burgher’s textual flânerie depicts a city where the manipulation of the spectacle causes alienation, and the urban planning under the principle of the spectacle obscurely forces capitalist deprivation and leads to the destruction of local history and memory.
Ⅳ. Chapter Organization
In the first chapter of my thesis, I argue that the narration of this novel could be regarded as Burgher’s textual flânerie which presents the city as a collage constituted by different interpretations represented by different characters. What he records includes his and several characters’ walking in the city, so the street-level perspective is the most significant for knowing a city and for connecting individual feelings with objective environment. I would examine the significance of the dérive taken by
Burgher and the meanings of different characters’ walking taken in their everyday life.
Walking as a spatial practice provides Rook a way to revive his emotions and feelings so as to prevent the banality of life. For Aunt, strolling in the streets is necessary for her while begging to survive, but it also allows her individual freedom and resistance against urban hegemony. Burgher’s dérive works not only as an investigation of urban life but also as a critical tool that, operated in the realm of everyday life, fragments the city into different zones of ambience and reconstructs it into a more humanistic city.
Chapter Two will focus on explaining how Burgher’s textual flânerie deconstructs the extension of countryside which is represented by Victor’s rooftop garden and the shopping mall Arcadia. I will examine Burgher’s observation in these two places. From Burgher’s penetrating eye, both of them are artificial environment far away from nature, and the greenery in these places functions as spectacles for
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personal collection and visual consuming. Moreover, Burgher’s dérive in Arcadia not only reveals that the desire for pastoral utopia is degenerated into the
commodification of nature but also brings up the issue of public right to the central urban space. A hierarchy and visual code could be preserved in the Arcadia, which is ironically opposed to the freedom and openness in the pastoral utopia Arcadia. I will compare the traditional Soap Market with the modernized shopping mall to argue that:
the juxtaposition of the Arcadia topos with the political issue of the use of the central public space is employed by Crace to highlight that the life of city does not reside in the transplanted greenery or manmade countryside, but in the organism which thrives with the help of its denizens in spite of their position in the socioeconomic strata. In this novel, such life is threatened by the establishment of a spectacular building, which leads to the theme of my next chapter.
In the third chapter, I would examine the social relationship and the production of urban space in Arcadia, and I argue that Burgher’s textual flânerie delineates a city saturated with the spectacle against which his practice of dérive is taken, and that Burgher’s writing is a resistance against the all-encompassing control of the spectacle.
I will first examine the motivation that propels Joseph to emigrate from the country to the city. Then, Victor’s and Em’s interaction with others will be the point to analyze the manipulation of the spectacle on man’s psychology and the alienation it leads to.
Moreover, I will also analyze the influence caused by the geographical change which is represented by the incidence that the Soap Market is replaced by the Arcadia. The emphasis will be the demonstration organized by the market traders and its customers and the way how the government deals with the following riot. Burgher’s writing reveals how the use of the spectacle by the capitalist and bureaucratic power threatens the life of a city.
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The most important of all, Burgher’s dérive also makes known the rebirth of the Soap Market: the Soap Two. It is the place where he can see “life,” where he can feel freedom and interact with the environment at his pleases. I think the power of regeneration represented by the rise of the Soap Two is symbolized by the title of this novel “Arcadia.” “Arcadia” symbolizes life and the power of rebirth. Burgher
witnesses the demise as well as the rebirth of the city. The eye that observes the city is like that of the flâneur who drifts in and out of the crowd. The strolling and the keen observation dissolve the alienation between the individual and the environment.
Such observation reveals the heterogeneity in the city. It pays attention to the
stimulants which could be turned into the power to resist the excessively objectified, programmed world. Reading Arcadia from the situationist perspectives of dérive, détournement, and the spectacle, I argue that this novel suggests another literary type which is more close to the fragmented urban life, and it maps a psychogeographical city: the real city is not simply the objective planned space and architecture, but it could be perceived through spatial practices based on everyday life practice, and through the study of the mental map we can look through the false wonderland which is actually the phantasmagoria of commodification.