London: A Psychic Landscaping of a Postmodern Metropolis as Dystopia (original) (raw)
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Representations of London life abound in contemporary British Black and Asian migrant fiction. Some are bleak, some conjure up images of an urban idyll, while others are frenetic and disturbed. Yet all of these fictional representations of London endeavour to make the city legible to us, to make it possible for us to find a way to read the city and understand something of its structure, protagonists, and plot. Depending on individual perspective, London can assume very different characters or personalities. This is an idea that ties in well with central concepts taken from those working in the area of Psychogeography. As Will Self has observed, Psychogeography is 'concerned with the personality of place itself'. 1 Psychogeographical ideas, therefore, may prove relevant to this exploration of literary representations of the relationship between London and the migrant. To what extent do our physical surroundings influence our emotional responses and behaviour? Psychogeography emphasises the connection between place and psychology. London, along with Paris, is acknowledged as one of the ultimate psychogeographical cities. It is also the setting for significant literary explorations of British Black and Asian migration. This paper will seek to apply key ideas of Psychogeography to the study of literary representations of migrant experience in the postcolonial metropolitan centre by authors including Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, and John Healy. The character of the city of London in the postcolonial era is a key consideration when exploring literary representations of the Black and South Asian Diaspora. The writers in question explore the intricate connections between space, place, objects, emotion, and memory, and superimpose these themes onto fundamental explorations of postcolonial experience in contemporary Britain.
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Elizabeth Harrower’s first novel, Down in the City (1957), introduces concerns that define her oeuvre, offering a typically adroit depiction of destructive domestic relations and middle-class mores. Focused on the marriage of upper-class Esther Prescott and ‘boy from the back blocks’ Stan Petersen, the novel embeds this central narrative in a compelling portrait of Australian urban modernity. The novel’s eponymous city is Sydney in the immediate postwar period, which Harrower writes with attention to its booming industry, new wealth and burgeoning commodity culture. At the beginning of the novel and at certain points throughout it, the city seems to offer sensuous enjoyment, increased liberty; however, Harrower emphasizes an urban modernity under the spell of capitalism and commodity culture, dominated by ‘air-conditioned’, ‘disinfectant-smelling’ spaces of ‘no light, no land, no sea’. In these spaces of urban alienation, female autonomy is circumscribed and interpersonal relationships are destructive. Arguing that this depiction of the urban milieu is central to the novel, this essay explores the narrative’s presentation of space and its capacity to produce subjectivities and condition relations.
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The Place of Bloomsbury in the Novels of George Gissing
Opticon1826, 2009
social surveys, tourist guides and journalistic 'explorations' of 'how the poor live'. But novels are invaluable in showing how the spaces of the city were perceived and used and how the city was 'performed' in everyday practice. So in this paper I am interested in how Gissing made use of the area's geography and how his characters moved through Bloomsbury and the wider metropolis at a variety of scales. My starting point is Henri Lefebvre's discourse on The Production of Space and his conceptual triad of 'spatial practices', 'representations of space' and 'representational spaces' (Lefebvre 1991). In the readings of most commentators, 'representation of space' is a conceptual act undertaken by planners, politicians, academic theorists and novelists-in other words, the discourse of the powerful, telling us how we should think about the organization of space-whereas 'representational spaces' are the spaces of resistance, of carnival, of subversion, the appropriation of space by the powerless or, more generally, 'spaces that are lived, experienced and recoded through the actions of those who occupy and use them' (Elden 2009, 590). 'Spatial practices' could be interpreted as the material expressions of these representations in action and movement: actually building an environment of boulevards or apartment blocks, or introducing regulations to control land use or manage traffic; or occupying space, not just symbolically, as in carnival, but in the practices of everyday life, the routine of the journey to work, or of house-hunting, or the 'polite politics' of tactical transgression. This is not a simple typology. The boundaries between representations and practices are impossible to police and, of course, working historically, we can rarely know about practice other than through its representation. But, at the very least, Lefebvre's work offers a useful discipline in how we think about space as a social product. So where do the spaces of novels fit in? Franco Moretti (1998) argues that making maps of novels can change the way we read them, revealing themes and arguments that their authors never made explicit. For Moretti, space is 'an internal force', shaping narrative from within: 'what happens depends a lot on where it happens', and 'without a certain kind of space, a certain kind of story is simply impossible' (Moretti 1998, 70, 100). Another literary commentator, Andrew Thacker (2003), wants to clarify our use of the terms 'place' and 'space'. At the time of human geography's quantitative and humanistic revolutions in the 1970s, 'space' was abstract geometry-the friction of distance, the spatial coordinates of one location relative to another-while 'place' was associated with 'sense of'-it was the character of a location that made it unique, that provoked emotional reactions. But for Lefebvre and Thacker, not only is space deemed to be socially produced, not just a spatial container and never empty, but space implies history, change, becoming, while place is (just) about being. Thacker invokes Michel de Certeau and his distinction between 'place', which we map, and 'space', which is actualised through the tour (de Certeau 1984, 117-22). Place implies stability; space is about direction, movement, velocity. Space is a 'practiced place'. Michelle Allen (2008, 140-1) summarises 'the differences between the two ways of representing urban experience' by comparing two authorial instructions from Gissing's novel, The Nether World
Geographies of Memory and Postwar Urban Regeneration in British Literature: London as Palimpsest
Cojocaru, Alina. Geographies of Memory and Postwar Urban Regeneration in British Literature: London as Palimpsest. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022.ISBN-13: 978-1-5275-8453-2; ISBN-10: 1-5275-8453-4 https://www.cambridgescholars.com/product/978-1-5275-8453-2 , 2022
This book proposes a new interdisciplinary approach to the literary representations of London by means of correlating geocriticism, spatial literary studies and memory studies in order to investigate the interplay between reality and fiction in mapping the urban imaginary. It conducts an analysis of London in British literature published between 1975-2005, exploring the literary representations of the real urban restructurings prompted by the rebuilding projects in war and poverty-stricken districts of London, the remapping of the metropolis by immigrants, the gentrification and displacement of communities, as well as the urban dissolution caused by terrorism. The selected works of fiction written by Peter Ackroyd, Penelope Lively, Zadie Smith, Andrea Levy, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Doris Lessing and Ian McEwan provide a record of the city in times of de/reconstruction, emphasizing the structure of London as a palimpsest, which becomes a central image. The book contributes to the development of the subject field by introducing a number of original concepts (mythopos, mnemotopos, landguage, entropic habitus, urban specularity) which connect geocriticism and memory studies. The originality of this book consists in its innovative contribution to literary studies and dynamic interdisciplinary approach which attracts a wide spectrum of interest across emerging research fields in the humanities and beyond.