A Fractured Vision of Modernity: The “Poetic” Turn and the Writing of Urban Space in 1980s Chinese Avant-Garde Fiction

Abstract

Since the 1980s, with the advancement of reform and opening up and the rapid changes in social structure, Chinese literary creation has entered the reflection and reconstruction of the existing narrative paradigm and aesthetic order. This article takes Chinese avant-garde novels in the 1980s as the object of study, focusses on the “broken modern picture” presented by them, and examines the intrinsic isomorphism between the poetic turn and urban space writing. The study adopts the text-reading method, and with the help of the theoretical perspective of spatial poetics, it takes works by Can Xue, Ma Yuan, and Ge Fei as cases for comparing and identifying the spatial heterogeneity in their fiction. The study found that avant-garde novels respond to the crisis of modernity with narrative “subtraction”: through the poetic stripping of language and the fragmentation and reorganisation of structure, to dispel the oppression of grand narratives; urban space, as a symbolic field, becomes a key intermediary for writers to transform fragmented reality experience into modern art patterns. This article believes that the poetic practice of avant-garde novels is not only a local experiment of spatial poetics, but also an important path for Chinese writers to rebuild sensory experience and subject speech after the collapse of the narrative framework.