关键词: 怀旧, 意象, 空间性, 新文化地理学, 中山大学

Abstract:

In the Oxford English Dictionary, nostalgia means sentimental yearning for a period of the past; regretful or wistful memory of an earlier time; and severe homesickness. That is to say, nostalgia has the meaning of desire to back home. As the longing (Gr. algia) for home (nostos), nostalgia is defined as the longing for a home that no longer exists or never existed. This feeling of loss and fantastical romance was identified in the seventeenth century as a curable disease, yet by the late 20th century it had become the incurable modern condition. Nostalgia is also shown to be spatial in its expressions as well as causes, and must be investigated using a ‘dual archeology of memory and place, and a dual history of illusions and actual places’. In addition, nostalgia are both restorative and reflective, and thus aimed to both conquer and shatter space. The emergence of nostalgia is associated with various acts of spatio-temporal distanciation, from the regulation of nation-states to globalization. The locations which can call for the nostalgic motions are not only the so-called hometown, but also the places where are full of our memories of some special times, such as our campus. Therefore, the campus can be made as a kind of nostalgic space. In order to explore the nostalgic environment on the campus and discuss its spatiality, this article regards nostalgia as a spatial issue, selected Sun Yat-sen University as the study case, and its alumnus as the research objects, to describe alumnus image of Sun Yat-sen University and their construction of nostalgic space. The methodologies using to collect data are in-depth interviews and image map drawing, and the analysis method is text analysis. For doing so, we interviewed 27 alumnus and collected 35 image maps, and encoded these data. The results include: 1) For the alumnus, their nostalgic images can be divided into indicated nostalgic and evaluated nostalgic images, which are shaped by their individual and collective memories, and are influenced by the real environment of the campus, the different living experiences and daily routes in the past, graduation time and genders of these alumnus; 2) The spatiality of the campus are constructed by alumnus’ nostalgic images, and can be divided into 3 intertwined dimensions: the space as a container, power space and emotional space. However, the spatiality is internal contradictory, and becomes the unity of restorative and reflective nostalgias. These results can prove and compensate the nostalgic research on the human geography perspective, and the theories about space. In addition, the results can provide the suggestion to the utility of alumni resources and formulation of alumni policies. We hope that the coming research can use other kinds of objects to explore how to construct the nostalgic spaces.

Key words: nostalgia, image, spatiality, New Cultural Geography, Sun Yat-sen University