Literature of the City and War Flashcards

Flashcards covering key vocabulary and concepts from the lecture notes on literature of the city and war.

Spatiality in 20th-century Literature

Characterizes the attenuation of plot-structure and the re-emergence of scenes, situations, and images no longer subordinated to a narrative chain.

Subjectivity and Spatial Experience

Focuses on individual instances of insight produced through the encounter between a human subject and the surrounding reality.

Novel's Role in Temporalized Human Experience

Before the 20th century, temporality was the crucial dimension in which meaning was assessed.

Spatial Construction of Identity in the 20th Century

Novels focus on the space in which protagonists live and move, rather than a bildungsroman timeline.

Modernist Novels & Sensation

Recurrent interest in sensation: the handling of objects, the observation of shifting light, savors and smells, etc.

Mental Aloofness

Impulses that do not come from the outside, but from the inside.

Urban Novel

Emerged in the 19th century, reflecting the growth of cities and urban populations.

Modern City Emergence

Shaped by industry, innovations in transportation, and mass migrations in the early 1900s.

La Belle Epoque

The turn of the 20th century: a time of modern invention, intense art production and relative peace.

Georg Simmel's Metropolis

Not just a spatial entity with sociological consequences but a sociological entity formed spatially.

Modernization and Urban Space

Urban space is the process of modernization writ large, the point of concentration of modernity.

Fragmentation in Modern Literature

Associated with the division of the social field, increasing tensions in moral discourse, and the fragmentation of subjective perception.

Walter Benjamin on Sense Perception

Sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence in response to social and historical situations.

Simmel on Urban Experience

The subject is threatened by objective culture, the impersonal nature of interactions, and the sense of losing control.

Metropolitan Spleen

Connected with the contrast between urban artificiality and idyllic rural life.

Impressionism as Urban Art

Sees the world through the eyes of the townsman, reacting with overstrained nerves to external impressions.

Avant-Garde Art and the City

the city generates specific perceptual problems, it implies the production of new perceptual models and new representational techniques

Chronotope

Bakhtin’s concept where narrative action is embedded in the construction of spatio-temporal images.

Modern Urban Novels Composition

Composed of self-referential and historical-documentary worlds, transcending the opposition between individual and city.

Virginia Woolf on Male Aggression

Speaks of a subconscious Hitlerism in the hearts of men, a desire for aggression, domination, and enslavement.

Freud on Civilization

Civilization is the fragile collective effort to save us from our own destructive compulsions.

Modernist Writing and Trauma

Offers a pertinent means of expressing traumas; fiction and poetry function as post-traumatic discourse.