Title: Narrating the City: Representations of Urban Space in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction
Abstract: Contrary to what the idea of mapping implies, space is more than a geographical surface. In the past decades, spatial structures have been theorised as dynamic, multilayered living organisms created by those who inhabit them, and hence as systems almost impossible to map. How, then, do contemporary Anglophone narratives seek to represent the overpoweringly complex spatial networks of our increasingly urbanised 21st-century environment? Conceptualising spatial structures in those experiential terms that have been suggested by urban theory, and thinking of urban space, in particular, as a dynamic textual fabric, we will find that the sociological notion of appropriated spaces, as discussed in the wake of Lefèbvre's The Production of Space, evokes an understanding of spatial structures which defies narrative representation. Michel de Certeau, Edward Soja, and Kevin Lynch, discussing how we experience the city, have put forward that the city cannot be described in its totality: Any representation of urban space rules out the idea of omniscient narration. The complex whole of ever-shifting structures which keeps being written by its participants can only be anticipated by the subjective, fragmentary view from within the city which always also connotes the many possible alternative perspectives on the city. How can urban narratives escape their inherently linear structure to depict the 'networks of these moving, intersecting writings,' which, as de Certeau claims in his 'Walking in the City,' constitute the city, and which 'compose a manifold story that has neither author nor spectator'? Discussing contemporary narrative strategies which seek to represent 'urban complexity' as identified by urban theory in narratives, such as Norman Klein's Bleeding Through and Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, I will show how the 'translation' of spatial structures into narrative terms gives us a closer insight into the ways in which complex urban structures are experienced and perceived today.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-01-01
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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