英文摘要 |
Toronto is both diasporized and dialogized in "What We All Long For." It is diasporized because it is, for the second-generation characters as well as for their parents, a space of multi-locality as well as multiple processes of displacement and emplacement, through which both the city and its city dwellers are transformed. Moreover, as the text weaves together a network of urban spatial practices and responses, Toronto is also presented as a dialogic space. More importantly, it is dialogized in the Bakhtinian sense because the text is polyphonic-expressive of many city dwellers' desires and longings-without privileging a singular character's voice or wants. Finally, the text posits dialogism as a mode of (urban) existence; i.e., to exist is to exist dialogically, holding oneself answerable to the address of the Other. In this matrix of perspectives and yearnings, the characters, expressing their longings through spatial practices, respond to and develop their responsibility (answerability) to their social contexts. This interactive network, however, is not without gaps or lacunae, as exemplified in Quy's possible death, which drives "home" far-reaching questions about a global city's contradictory openness and resistance to strangers. |