This paper examines the remapping of libido and capital in Zhu Wen's Nanjing-based stories and discusses their influence from, and innovation against, modernist literary traditions. Drawing upon the theories of Walter Benjamin, Fredric Jameson, Henri Lefebvre, and David Harvey, as well as the scholarship on Chinese postsocialism, I contend that, like the Western flâneur whose existence and experience are key to our understanding of both modernity as an empirical experience and modernism as a literary-cultural aesthetic, Zhu's fictional urban wanderers and drifters present a self-reflective response not only to the changing conditions of the postsocialist subject but also to the representational endeavors of the postsocialist writer. In particular, the spatialized manners in which Zhu's wandering characters encounter history and temporality — often facilitated by the locale of Nanjing utilized as an ancient-capital-turned-modern-city and as a provincial capital — reveal the convoluted nature not only of China's urban (post)modernity but also of such attempted artistic “ruptures” by contemporary writers like Zhu Wen.
Yun Zhu (Sun,) studied this question.