THE URBAN LANDSCAPE IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE

CESUN 2010

The city as historical, cultural, and social phenomenon

• The early cities provided a way of organizing a community in relation to the land

• As the function of the city changed, so did the structure

• The most radical change began with the Enlightenment (John Locke)

• The first urban historians considered the city as a subject in and of itself

• They stressed three ways of conceptualizing the city: (1) the origins of the modern city (Spengler, Mumford); (2) the physical laws of the modern city (Park, Burgess); (3) the effect of the city on its inhabitants (Weber, Durkheim, Simmel

• New theories and practices of urbanism and city planning have focused on space as a category of analysis and criticism (Foucault, Lefebvre, Hayden, Soja, the Chicago school of urban sociology, Jacobs, Garreau...)

The city as literary phenomenon

• The development of the novel and subsequent narrative modes - comic realism, magic realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism -- reflects the rise of the city

• Literary cities are both imaginative constructions and reflections of the material reality of their originals

• Space is in fiction represented through and as temporality, as a narrative event or events

• Cities in literature also portray a network of relationships unfolded (or not) over narrative time

• A few examples: some images of the city were grounded on a distinction between city and country, urbanism and anti-urbanism; the naturalist city was a place of limits, a product of material activity and mechanical forces; at the center of empire the focus was on capital cities; the modern city was sometimes seen as a city of the dead, or at least in decline

The postmodern city

• The postmodern city loses claim to being “real”

• What is brought to the city is what is got back: the “echo” principle becomes the basis for reality

• Lacking transcendence, the postmodern city cannot go beyond what it consumes

• The city becomes a state of mind: it thinks us and not the other way around

The city in Central European Literature

• The urban novel in Central European literature has the following features:

1. the image of the city is created from the point of view of writer or other people;

2. the city is represented as space determined by its inhabitants;

3. the city is described as symbolically different but at the same time unchangeable space that is marked by particular well-known places and monuments;

4. people who inhabit the city possess certain features that correspond with the described place;

5. the city is seen as Bakhtinian open, socially and culturally heterogeneous, polyphonic, multiple, and multi-perspective place;

6. the city is the image of world, time, society, national or multi-national culture

The Other City (1993)

• Michal Ajvaz’s novel The Other City draws on the literary traditions of Gnosticism and magical Prague

• The present-day city and its fantastic or legendary alter-ego are as much the main characters as the somewhat puppetlike human protagonists

• The novel is set in St. Nicholas’s church, Petřín Hill, the Malá Strana Café, the Slavia Café, Karlova Street, Kaprova Street, Žatecka Street, Železna Street, Pohorelec Square, the large Clementinum historical library etc.

• On his walks, the narrator begins to notice more and more gaps in his familiar surroundings, until a whole “other city” gradually opens up, overlapping the daylight world

• The figure of flâneur - “Prague walkers”

The City Builder (1977)

• The City Builder is a first person history of failed urban planning and utopianism recalling George Konrad’s work at the Budapest Institute of Urban Planning

• The narrator is the city planner in an unnamed Eastern European city, who has tried to preserve his humanity as he climbed the ranks of bureaucracy

• The narrator is given substance through his memories and his perspectives on the people and the world around him

• The City Builder can also be seen as a series of universal life situations and archetypal confrontations; the hero is, in a way, Everyman

• The planner is both the artist, the creator, the preserver of civilization and a ruthless and amoral manipulator

• The true protagonist of the novel is the city itself where the narrator feels at once comfortable and confined

Gebürtig (Native-Born) (1992)

• Robert Schindel pointed out that his novel is very much a book about Vienna

• The title of his novel, Gebuertig refers to (1) the children of victims and perpetrators alike, who seek to know their roots, to confront their parents, and to understand the extent to which the burden of the past shapes their present; (2) one of the characters – Hermann Gebirtig; (3) Mordechai Gebirtig

• Construction of the urban space in the novel:

1. streets, squares, and parks as public places;

2. pubs and coffee houses as semi-public places;

3. means of public transportation;

4. city districts;

5. other Austrian topographies;

6. other urban spaces and their relationship to the urban space of Vienna

Works consulted

• Ajvaz, Michal. The Other City. Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009.

• Bolton, Jonathan. “Reading Michal Ajvaz.” Context 17. http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa=customcontent&GCOI=15647100511460&extrasfile=A1260DE2%2DB0D0%2DB086%2DB6C01D239DCE1501%2Ehtml. Accessed 8 June 2010.

• Feinberg, Anat. “Abiding in a Haunted Land: The Issue of Heimat in Contemporary German-Jewish Writing.” New German Critique 70 (1997): 161-181.

• Freeman, Thomas. “Jewish Identity and the Holocaust in Robert Schindel’s Gebuertig.” Modern Austrian Literature (1997): 117-126.

• Ganim, John M. “Cities of Words: Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature.” Modern Language Quarterly 63.3 (2002): 365-382.

• Harwood, Christopher. “Writing in the Time Since Time Exploded: The Czech Novel, 1990-2002.” World Literature Today 77. 3/4 (2003): 64-68.

• Interview by Erika Zlamalová, Prague Writers´ Festival, February 9th, 2010 Translation from the Czech by Meghan Forbes.  http://www.pwf.cz/en/authors-archive/michal-ajvaz/2984.html. Accessed 8 June 2010.

• Janaszek-Ivaničkova, Halina. “Slavic Literatures in the Chaos of Postmodern Changes.” Neohelicon 2 (2006): 9-35.

• Johnson, Jeri. “Literary Geography: Joyce, Woolf, and the City.” City 4.2 (2000): 199-214.

• Konrad, George. The City Builder. Champaign and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007.

• Lehan, Richard. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkley and Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1998.

• Marcus, David. “Memory as Homeland.” Dissent Winter (2008): 120-124.

• Sanders, Ivan. “Freedom’s Captives: Notes on George Konrad’s Novels.” World Literature Today 57.2 (1983): 210-214.

• Schindel, Robert. Gebuertig. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag and Residenz Verlag, 1992.

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