The Existential Dilemma on the Road: Road Narrative and Modernity Reflection in The Bridges of Madison County
Road narrative has long been an important medium for interpreting individual liberation and social alienation in modern literary creation. Traditional travelogue literature mainly focuses on geographical records and landscape descriptions as its core content, while contemporary road narratives place more emphasis on depicting the spiritual journey behind the migration of characters in space. The creator uses the flowing space as a core metaphor to present the opposition between individual subjectivity and institutionalized social norms. Zygmunt Bauman proposed the theory of liquid modernity, in the social environment depicted by this theory, modern people are always in a set of contradictions. People constantly pursue unlimited individual freedom, while also continuously being constrained by refined social discipline. This paper takes The Bridges of Madison County as the research text, analyzing the internal connections between the construction of internal space, gender power, narrative aesthetics, and modern survival predicaments in the work. Most existing related studies mainly interpret this work from the perspective of love. This paper breaks through this single research dimension and constructs a multi-disciplinary analytical framework that integrates spatial politics, feminist criticism, and modernity theory. This paper further explains the unique literary value of popular love novels in interpreting modern people’s survival predicaments, and also provides a new theoretical reference to deeply discuss contemporary American road narrative texts.
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