Literature of the City and War Flashcards

Literature of the City and War

A. Space

• 19th Century Novels:
  • Functioned as servants of the plot (Genette, 1969, p. 47).
  • Descriptions of spaces and objects provided the scene for actions, determining the significance of the fictional universe.
• Modern Novel:
  • Broke the symmetry of life and narrative.
  • Traditional scenes and settings emancipated from the plot, gaining significance as aesthetic composition.
  • Challenged interpretive strategies based on dynamic models of narrative.
• Spatiality and Pictorialism:
  • Characterize the attenuation of plot structure in 20th-century literature.
  • Re-emergence of scenes and images no longer subordinated to a narrative chain.
  • Blurred boundaries between textuality and visuality due to the prevalence of films, cinemas, and television.
• Spatial Experience:
  • Focuses on individual instances of insight produced through the encounter between a human subject and the surrounding reality.
  • Intimately linked to a notion of subjectivity.
• Historical Context:
  • The notion of experience was dominated by spatial models at the end of the 18th century.
  • Human judgment was based on observation and recurrence.
• Subjectivity:
  • Determination through the spatial perception of the body.

Temporality vs. Spatialization

• Novel's Role Before the 20th Century:
  • Served as a major symbolic form mediating an idea of temporalized human experience.
  • Temporality was the crucial dimension in which meaning could be assessed.
• 20th Century Shift:
  • Spatial construction of identity became more important.
  • Novels shifted away from the bildungsroman (coming-of-age story).
  • Timeline lost importance, while the space in which protagonists lived and moved gained importance.
• Spatialization of the Modern Novel:
  • A relatively well-described phenomenon to literary historians.
  • The notion of space is often used to designate something no longer conceivable in terms of time.
• Key Theorists of Space:
  • Marc Auge, Edward Soja, Frederic Jameson, Georg Simmel.

Virginia Woolf and Sensation

• Woolf's Novels:
  • Situations and events are considered through different perspectives.
  • Anatomized to reveal different universes of associations and imagination in different consciousnesses.
  • Action deviates from consecutive situations into dream-like stillness.
  • Interesting aspect is not where the situation will lead, but how latent possibilities can be brought forth.
  • Situations are intended at a level transcending subjectivity.
  • Each situation stands out as a self-enclosed monument, not a link in a chain of action.
• Modernist Novels:
  • Expose a recurrent interest in sensation.
  • Handling of objects (newspapers, sandwiches, hairbrushes).
  • Observation of shifting light, changing shades, and the behavior of animals, savors, and smells.
  • A thick layer of sensation is never fully absorbed into the conscious universe of the protagonists.
• Inner Distance:
  • Splits up individual characters.
  • Projects sensational activity onto the surroundings.
  • Bits and pieces of sensual content are left behind and recorded only by the text as traces of a virtual experience.
• Mental Aloofness:
  • Impulses that do not come from the outside, but from the inside.

B. City / Urban Novel – The Metropolis in Literature

• Emergence: The "urban novel" or "city novel" appeared in the 19th century.
• Urbanization Statistics:
  • Early 20th Century: Approximately 10% of the world's population lived in towns or cities.
  • 1975: This figure rose to 37.8%.
  • 1995: Reached 45.3%.
  • 2006 (Projected): Every second human being expected to live in urban settlements.
  • 2030 (Projected): Over 60% of the world's population will be urbanized.
• Megacities:
  • Just before World War II: Only London and New York had populations approaching eight million.
  • Early 21st Century: There were 22 'megalopolises' with eight-figure populations.
• Rate of Urbanization: The rate of urbanization has been considerable in the last fifty years, with the majority of the world's population now living in cities.
• Academic Interest: Academic literary criticism amplified the pervasiveness of the urban phenomenon through many studies on fictional cities and urban conditions.
• Literary Trends: Nearly all literary trends and movements showed interest in urban imagery and the ethical/religious connotations of the literary metropolis.
• Focus: Much attention was given to literature thematizing the condition of modernity.
• Modernity Gauge: Studying urban literature from the second half of the nineteenth century offered a promising way to gauge the modernity of a literary text.

Rise of the Modern City and its Impact

• Shaping Factors:
  • Industry
  • Innovations in transportation (railroads and roads)
  • Mass migrations of people.
• La Belle Epoque: The turn of the 20th century was a time of modern invention, art production, and relative peace.
• Urban Growth: European cities changed and grew rapidly due to technological and engineering advancements.
• Manufacturing:
  • Machine-based production displaced handcrafted goods.
  • Machines took up farming tasks; factories emerged in suburbs.
• Transportation: Moved people and goods in/out of urban centers at an unprecedented rate.
• Reactions: City dwellers were both awed and repelled by modern engineering marvels (e.g., subway systems).
• Concerns: Some feared machines would render humanity obsolete.
• Artistic Focus: The city became an important subject for artists, photographers, designers, and architects, leading to new documentation methods.
• George Grosz: Expressed despair, hate, and disillusionment in drawings, aiming to expose the world as ugly, sick, and mendacious.

The Metropolis as a Sociological Entity

• Simmel's Perspective: The Metropolis is not just a spatial entity with sociological consequences but a sociological entity formed spatially (Simmel [1903], 35).
• Modernization: Urban space is modernization writ large, described by Georg Simmel as the "point of concentration of modernity" (27).
• Key Sociologists/Urban Theorists: Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Jürgen Habermas, Louis Wirth, Lewis Mumford.
• Aesthetic Autonomy: Based on confidence in literature's ability to impose order, value, and meaning on the chaos and fragmentation of industrial society (Graff [1979], 33), from Romanticism.
• City as Unifying Principle: Seen as helping to deal with alienation and fragmentation of modern life, despite creating that alienation and fragmentation in itself.

Home as a Concept

• Zarina's Perspective: Zarina (American, born India, 1937): Home is not necessarily permanent but an idea carried with us.
• Artwork: "Home Is a Foreign Place" (1999) - portfolio of 36 woodcuts with letterpress.

Literary Examples: T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin on Urban Life

• T.S. Eliot – Waste Land (1922): Illustrates the desolation and alienation of modern city life.
  • "Unreal City,"
• T.S. Eliot – The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock (1917): Depicts the unease and alienation in urban environments, filled with images of fog and deserted streets.
• "Let us go then, you and I,
  When the evening is spread out against the sky
  Like a patient etherized upon a table;"
• Philip Larkin - Here (1964): Contrasts industrial shadows and urban simplicity, capturing the essence of a large town and its surroundings.

C. Fragmentation

• Fragmentation in Modern Literature:
  • Modern literature is associated with a general condition of fragmentation.
• Social Sciences Perspective:
  • Division of the social field into various subsystems.
  • Increasing tensions within moral discourse.
  • Fragmentation of subjective (self-)perception.
  • Changes in social role models and growing impersonality of social interaction.
• Fragmentation of Private Life:
  • Associated with "moral decline" and "neurasthenia."
  • Moral fragmentation is a key topic since Romanticism.
• Breakdown of Values:
  • Moral values become detached from concrete practices.
  • Collective consciousness focuses on abstract discourses.
  • Modernization creates a climate where moral discourse is heterogeneous, influenced by class, education, and metaphysical differences.

Walter Benjamin and the Consequences of Social Modernity

• Impersonal Relationships: Emphasized the impact of impersonal relationships on the perception of modern individuals, especially in urban settings.
• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1935):
  • Argued that sense perception is linked to the subject’s social and historical situation.
  • “During long periods of history, the mode of human sense perception changes with humanity’s entire mode of existence”
• Simmel's Discussion of Urban Experience:
  • Articulated how the subject is threatened by objective culture.
  • Highlighted the impersonal nature of social interactions and the sense of losing control over one’s life.
• Aestheticization of Everyday Existence: Connected with modern experience.

Simmel on Modernity and the Soul's Lack of Center

• Seeking Stimulations:
  • The lack of something definite at the center of the soul impels us to search for momentary satisfaction in ever-new stimulations, sensations, and external activities.
  • This leads to entanglement in instability and helplessness, manifested as the tumult of the metropolis, mania for traveling, pursuit of completion, and disloyalty regarding taste, style, opinions, and personal relationships (Simmel [1978], 484).

The Impersonal World of Consumer Society

• Dual Nature: An environment that is both empty and teeming with uncontrollable perceptions and multiform practices, creating a "chaos of impressions and interactions" (Frisby [1992], 71).
• Implications of Fragmentation:
  • Moral Consequences: The fragmentation of moral discourse.
  • Social-Psychological Consequences: The chaos of impressions and interactions.
• Cultural Criticism and Yardstick: These serve as both the object of cultural criticism and as a yardstick for the experience of modernity.

Literary Criticism and Fragmentation

• Symbolism and Avant-Garde: Theories focusing on symbolism and avant-garde movements tend to favor the social-psychological notion of fragmentation.
• Realistic Representations of the City: Theories on realistic representations concentrate on the moral implications of the phenomenon.
• Metropolitan Spleen:
  • Connected with the contrast between urban artificiality and idyllic rural life.
  • Manifests as a sickness of life, ‘mal du siècle’, becoming a sickness of the city.
  • The revolt against the city is portrayed as the revenge of sensitive souls on enlightened minds.

Impressionism and Modernity

• Impact of Modern Technology: Changed attitudes to life, creating a new feeling of speed and change.
• Urban Art: Impressionism is an urban art that discovers the landscape quality of the city and adapts to external impressions with strained nerves of modern technical society (Hauser [1951], 168).

City Life and Avant-Garde Art

• Source of Inspiration: The city is not only an important theme in avant-garde art but also the inspiration for new narrative techniques.
• Perceptual Problems: City life generates specific perceptual problems, implying the production of new perceptual models and new representational techniques (Smuda [1992], 137).
• Meaning Horizon: Fragmentation of social relationships and ideological discourses makes modernity the most important meaning horizon for the realist novel.
• Problematic Cultural Condition: Modernity is felt to be a problematic cultural condition by the characters.
• Hero's Transformation: The hero changes from the 19th-century realist novel to a subject undergoing disintegration, frantically seeking a solid subject position in a society oriented towards objectification.

The Quest for Authentic Experiences

• Truth in Realism: The quest for truth, typical of realist novelists, continues in a moderate form, seeking “authentic experiences.”
• Utopian Compensation: Authors strive for a utopian compensation to counteract the decline of subjectivity in the fragmented modern world.
• Fictional World Construction: The construction of the fictional world behind the city image processes external constructions of reality.
• Bakhtin’s Concept of the Chronotope: Narrative action is embedded in the spatio-temporal images accompanying a fictional story.
• New Reading Approach: Apart from plot and character, two types of chronotope need consideration.
  • A four-dimensional mental image, combining the aspects of space, with the time structure of action. In many realist and modernist novels, for example, the image of the protagonist arriving in the big city is created through descriptions of urban space that contextualize the (temporal) process of the encounter with the metropolis
  • A chronotope should be regarded a text’s fundamental image of the world. It creates a dialogue between chronotopes, created in the text by its producer, causes the reader to experience one particular type of image as dominant and to select it as the “overarching chronotope” which plays an important part in the process of interpretation, because the nature of its spatial indications (an idyllic setting, a commercial-industrial environment, a desolate landscape, the simultaneous chaos of a city) and its specific vision of temporal processes (the cycles of nature, the historical development of society, the subjective moment, the discontinuous temporal experience of a dream or of intoxication) set the boundaries within which fictional events can take place. In a sense, the overarching chronotope connects the temporal processes and spatial selections of literary reception.

Recurrent Themes and Urban Spaces

• Central Narrative Focus: Life in small communities or non-urbanized cultures.
• Flight from the City: A recurrent theme involving a move to the country house.
• Urban Idyll: Urban spaces can embody the idyllic chronotope in milieus with cyclical regeneration: middle-class houses, suburban villas, parks, and historical monuments.
• Avoidance and Symbolism: Other city aspects are avoided or symbolize banal and unaesthetic experiences.
• Urban Modernization and Decay: Processes are associated with the decline of cyclical time, described as phases of decay.
• Protagonist's Development: Described as a process of resignation, portraying the protagonist as a victim withdrawing from a society plagued by modernization.

Individual vs. City and Aesthetic Representation

• Moral Development of Protagonist: Struggles with the social world which is often symbolized by contact with the city will lead to maturity or resignation.
• Tragic Conflict: The urban individual may be at the mercy of an ethically superficial city. The confrontation between the individual and the city often takes the shape of a tragic conflict.
• Impressionistic Sensitivity: Evident in Oscar Wilde’s "Decay of Lying," showing how Impressionists influence the perception of city fogs and shadows (Wilde [1961], 26-27).
• City as Simulacrum: Aestheticist authors represent the city filtered through an artistic model.
• Aesthetic Qualities: This representation highlights impressionistic images conducive to expressing correspondences.

Discontinuity and Urban Situations

• Distorted Perceptions: A world where the spatial and temporal continuity of ordinary perceptions is distorted.
• Causal Relations and Time Axis: Everyday successive spatial impressions are linked by causal relations projected on an uninterrupted time axis.
• Reality Fragments in Collage: The writer attempts to link fragments of reality, creating artificial urban situations.
• Hyper-Real Perception: The physical elements of the city are compressed, observed in a dream-like/intoxicated state, creating dynamism (futurism), intoxication (dadaism), pathos (expressionism), or dreaming (surrealism).

Temporal Development and Avant-Garde Art

• Simultaneous Presentation: Involves the simultaneous presentation of different observational elements, which transcends ordinary modes of experience.
• Unstable Coordinates: Instability that stems from fast-paced variety and multiplicity.
• Objective: Deconstructs dominant social discourses and develops a counter-discourse.
• Expressionist Poets: Render hectic modern life into vitalistic representations. However, Joyce does not share this optimism.

Modernist Art and the Inner Life

• Virginia Woolf’s Perspective: Woolf believed the modernist artist’s role was to represent shifting internal life and fragmentary failures.
• High Modernism:
  • Not merely a copy of the “closed worlds” of symbolist tradition but also incorporates strategies from avant-garde and realist movements.
  • Aestheticist, hyperrealistic, and realistic in presenting modern subjectivity and diverse moral discourses.

Modern Urban Novels as Self-Referential and Historical

• Transcending Old Opposition: Transcend the private individual vs. public world framework.
• Interconstructed Self: The self constructs and is constructed by the cityscape.
• Plot as Perception: Plot unfolds as perceptions of place, movement and readings of the urban environment (Wirth-Neisser [1996], 21).
• Discontinuous Impressions: Technological highlights and social struggles lead to a series of impressions (Isernhagen [1983]).
• City as a Complex Network: Novels show the city as a set of overlapping lives. The construct reveals social fragmentation and moral heterogeneity.
• Modern Consciousness: The modern world is a complex network of various aspects. Textual construction shows self-questioning and counteracts objective culture.

D. War

• World War I:
  • War Poets: Soldiers writing from the front lines.
• World War II:
  • Delayed Literary Response: Not immediately apparent in literature after the war.
  • Cultural Memory: Represented later in works like Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.
• Virginia Woolf's Perspective on WWII:
  • Essay