Downriver’s Flâneur(s) : Space and Representation in the Fiction of Iain Sinclair

Within the realm of cultural theory it seems that there is considerable confusion, or at least deep ambivalence, concerning the status and function of maps and mapping. In this context, and at the ...

Reviews: History and the Media, Writing Biography: Historians and Their Craft, Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938–1940, Benjamin Now: Critical Encounters with ‘The Arcades Project’, Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England: The Representation of History in Printed Books, Shakespeare's Culture in Modern Performance, Shakespeare's Early History Plays: From Chronicle to Stage, Secret Shakespeare, Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare, Language and

David Rando's meticulous and thought-provoking Modernist Fiction and News nevertheless begins with a somewhat misleading title. Rando is less concerned with specific news sources or the publication history of little magazines, and much more interested in “the news” broadly conceived in opposition, and apposition, to modernist literature. Rando's main interest is the important ways in which literary output in the early twentieth century—he concentrates on works appearing in the 1930s—reacted to and against the proliferation of newsprint in the space of the “media ecology,” building on Mark Wollaeger's 2006 Modernism, Media and Propaganda.Literature, according to Rando, both appropriates and questions the methods used in popular newspapers, using techniques like “nearness” and “delay” to open up an anecdotal space within the story itself. Rando draws heavily on Benjamin's writings about the modes of experience to lay out his argument; Benjamin also gets the very first lines of the book: “Every instant brings us news from across the globe, yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. The previous sentence is adapted from Walter Benjamin's statement in his 1936 essay, ‘The Storyteller’; I have substituted ‘instant’ for ‘morning’ and perhaps that is modification enough to make Benjamin's idea absolutely contemporary” (1).The idea of contemporaneity saturates this book, and Rando is at pains to stress the relevance of his comments about the relationality of literature and newsprint to current times: “Modernist novelists are … the first tentative denizens of the information age who responded creatively, and thus, for us, importantly, to a media environment and public orientation toward experience that has by now become quite naturalized” (23). Nearness, contiguity in time and space on multiple levels, is an important thematic concern: there is first the nearness of a page of newsprint, where each story bears little or no relation to the one contiguous to it except a random simultaneity; contrasted to this is the nearness engendered by Benjamin's idea of the anecdote, where authorial specificity “shocks” the reader into an immediate awareness of events in a way that the newspaper never can. In other words, the physical nearness of news stories on the printed page paradoxically results in a distancing and flattening of affect that, for Rando as for Benjamin, is a problem addressed through literature: “[M]odernists perceived a growing distance between news reporting and lived experience, and they developed and honed narrative techniques and an experimental resolve that made nearness and experience defining values. Improving on what the newspaper promised but failed to do, modernist novelists hoped not just to ‘make it new,’ but also to ‘make it near’” (18).To this end, Rando devotes his attention in this slim volume to a “limited” set of literary texts that includes Joyce's Finnegans Wake, Dos Passos's U.S.A., and Stein's three major autobiographical works, as well as the many references to Benjamin's writing, especially from The Arcades Project (20). He invokes Derrida's Archive Fever to theorize about the simultaneous acts of recording and repression involved in modernist literature's desire to be a better record of the times than newsprint could be. Rando's bibliography is both current and theoretically rigorous, and his revisiting of critical texts like Andreas Huyssen's After the Great Divide (1987) revitalizes older works that have already had an important impact on the field of modernist studies.The chapter titled “Nearness” begins Rando's exploration of literary space and Benjamin's understanding of experience. Beginning with the division between erfahrung and erlebnis, Rando explains that the move from the former toward the latter parallels the move from anecdotal, personal storytelling toward nuggets of information for immediate consumption, that is, the news. In this light, modernist fiction's use of the newspaper both as raw material for plot and also as props within stories, becomes a resistance to the assimilative, easy-to-consume nature of news media. Reading Woolf's “The Mark on the Wall,” Rando shows how the narrator's opening refusal to date the story “reclaim[s] an experience in time and an experience of time … [that] will form the antithesis to the newspaper's homogenous, empty time, which is held off until the very end of the story” (40). Narrative twists are tied up with formalist experiments, so that we might identify in Woolf's stream of consciousness style “a sustained fantasy that explanations and facts can be indefinitely suspended, that one might dwell in illegitimate freedom, be released from the illusion that knowledge must be cobbled together from facts, and be exempted from the compulsion to live in the world clocked and charted by homogenous, empty time” (43).Rando suggests that if newsprint can be thought of as the “conscious,” linear, all-inclusive archive, then modernist literature becomes the “unconscious,” immediate, experiential one, working with and against its other, simultaneously imitating its methods even while it questions its claims to superiority and truth. Fiction becomes not simply contra facts but a more invidious version of them. It demands that readers substitute the idle act of empathy, which comes from reading news, for the shock caused by the “pathos of nearness” brought on by anecdotal literature.In the chapter entitled “Scandal,” Rando takes on Finnegans Wake and stresses its anecdotal nature as “a space where experience can emerge with a striking and unexpected intimacy not found in a newspaper, and where history that threatens to become abstract can concretize on a human scale not often found in traditional historiography” (53). Rando's comments on Joyce vis-à-vis Dante recalls some more recent work,1 but avoids convergences between Joyce criticism and genetic criticism.2 Benjamin's idea of the “pathos of nearness,” so central to Rando's own argument, comes from the former's “First Sketches,” for the The Arcades Project, and is itself therefore a tacit invitation to further consider literary revisions as an avenue for criticism. Although Rando does not develop this insight, his work perhaps provides fruitful avenues for further inquiry.In any case, Rando begins his chapter on Joyce and scandal with a discussion of HCE's “incident” in the park and draws on the work of other literary critics, Margot Norris and Wollaeger among them, to point out that the book “embarrasses the desire of news to extract reportable events from personal experience [and brings] scandal from the distant spheres of news into the intimate space of readers” (62). While this part of the chapter might sound familiar to those who have already spent time with the Wake, the second half uses the 1922 murder case against Frederick Bywaters and Edith Thompson and builds on the work of previous critics to demonstrate how Joyce's book of the night can be read as a series of “nested books” (72), the stories within stories loosely contained by the overarching text. The adulterous romance between Bywaters and Thompson nests inside the description of Paolo and Francesca, which is itself framed in the playacting between Glugg (Shem) and Issy, and the passage ends with one finger pointed outward, implicating the audience, with one word of sympathy: “Sowouyou.”3 Rando is best when he stops to dwell in close reading a single paragraph or even a line, and his claim that in each nested story “there exists a moment of pathos in which reports and events fall away and leave unframed experience in their stead, experiences that creep up and spring upon swooning observers” (71) is entirely convincing.Rando's obvious enjoyment in the complexities of Stein and Joyce that open his book poses some danger to the rest of the volume: subsequent texts seem to pale in comparison. He faces this problem in the third chapter, where the discussion of Dos Passos's trilogy is prefaced by the observation that the liquidation of character in the Wake is only one of the ways in which modernism tries to clear a space for itself in the media ecology. Dos Passos “writes characters right on the edge of the news” in a story that has been called “plotless, or propelled forward only by historical circumstances” (74–75). Thus, “[i]f Finnegans Wake denies all abstract contexts that would remove experience from its human scale, then Dos Passos's strategy is much the opposite … characters are seen from [a] great height, almost as mere side effects of news and history” (77). This examination of character leads Rando to deeper insights about language and nationhood that are closely tied to his opening injunction that we look to the modernists' “public orientation toward experience.” In a passage that can equally be read as literary criticism and political commentary, Rando notes, “For Dos Passos, the powerful continue to pervert the radically and distressingly malleable language of America for the purposes of domination, while the powerless seek to reinforce and rebuild the language of freedom upon which America was said to be founded” (86). Linking power, language, and the media ecology together, Rando concludes that “we see different strata of power productively engaged in struggle and disputation of the same single language, in the same way that Dos Passos self-consciously sculpts his narrative out of the common language and media space he shares with the news” (94).Rando's final two chapters, “Identity” and “War,” concentrate on Stein's autobiographical works, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas certainly, but more so Everybody's Autobiography and Wars I Have Seen, to show how the anecdotal form is used masterfully to break conventions of autobiographical writing as well as news reporting, so that one is “transformed from the empathetic newspaper reader to one who experiences a pathos of nearness” (111). These two chapters function like mirrors to each other, the first explaining Stein's pains to find an autobiographical mode that has no ending, and the second contrasting war news stories to assert the central truth about war, that it is made up of “endings of all kinds—of stories, of lives, the war, and, finally, Wars I Have Seen itself” (120). It is chiefly and most fruitfully in this last chapter that Rando turns to Derrida's ideas about archive fever, the simultaneous recording and suppressing of experience with which a testament like Wars necessarily engages. Again, Rando brings up the thorny relationship between news media and works of fiction that are forced to share the same media ecology, and shows how War both uses and abuses the techniques of reportage (one of the ironies of a book focused on “being existing,” or lived experience, is that it was marketed as war reportage when first published in 1945, and Rando dwells on the deliciousness of this). If Everybody's Autobiography is a book that is concerned with showing the hollowness of an always-already completed authorial “I” engaging with its own past, War, to Rando, is primarily concerned with ending, a (to quote Benjamin) “Messianic cessation of happening.”4 Of course, in the clash between the “real” and created worlds, there can be no ultimate contest, and Rando considers that fact: “Practically nothing can finally distinguish modernist fiction from news. The privileged sphere of the ‘literary’ is now everywhere and nowhere. The purview of news is finally everything. Between Stein and [war reporter Ernie Pyle] … there is little besides the ability to end, arrest, or stand still that can distinguish them. But it may be that this is no small difference in the age of endless information” (137).Rando's very last chapter is a brief statement he calls “Coda: Make It Now” in which he argues emphatically for the need to presume that “modernism matters most right now, and always has” (143). He cites recent work by Keith Williams and Patrick Collier, as well as Wollaeger, to assert that one must read modernism's questions and comments as relevant to our current perceived crisis in the news media. One cannot resist the rightness of his assertions—I wonder how many modernists would deny that they, at least, find the issues brought up by modernist writers relevant to their own daily, lived experiences. But Rando desires to reach beyond the literary reader, to the socially conscious and politically active one, the reader of works like Tom Fenton's Junk News: The Failure of the Media in the 21st Century (2009), which title he quotes as an example of how relevant modernist anxiety about news media is to the present day. This desire to “make now” some of the most obtuse works of modernist fiction to the field of cultural studies best further commentary. Rando's call to “make it now” strikes most powerfully in an example that he includes in his introduction but never revisits: Toni Morrison's refashioning of the real-life tale of Margaret Garner in Beloved. This novel, as opposed to Finnegans Wake or Everybody's Autobiography, say, is an example of a book that can equally be found in a small lending library or book club as in a classroom or literary investigation. It thus best demonstrates the political angle that Rando is at pains to stress: that the techniques of struggle used by fiction writers against the influence of news media can fruitfully be adapted by contemporary writers as well. Morrison's book is the best example of how Rando's conclusions about Woolf's resistance to reported time, Joyce's flirtations with scandal and immediacy, Dos Passos's refusal of historical determinacy through characterization, and Stein's ambivalence about beginnings and endings might all usefully and accessibly be applied to break the chains of constant and never-ending RSS feeds.Ultimately, this book provides a small Benjaminian shock of warning: it does not do to be glib about the shortcomings of hard-nosed commercial news media. Its strength, however, is when it ignores this larger context and concentrates on the playful, erudite reworkings of ordinary life that make up so much of modernist literature.

Reviewed by: Architecture and Modern Literature by David Spurr Rita Sakr (bio) Architecture and Modern Literature, by David Spurr. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2012. xi + 285 pp. $85.00 cloth; $30.00 paper. David Spurr’s Architecture and Modern Literature is in many ways monumental. It opens with a statement of its aims and parameters as an exploration of “a series of instances in which architecture and modern literature come together in ways that appear to break down the barriers between the two art forms, or at least to construct bridges between them,” while investigating “the manner in which the relations between architecture and literature are symptomatic of modernity as a crisis of meaning” (3, 6). The project thus appears both conceptually broad and well defined while it achieves two specific intellectual feats. On the one hand, the study constructs bridges not merely between architecture and literature but rather more widely, if largely implicitly, across literature, architecture, urban studies, cultural geography, art history, philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, and modernist studies. Perhaps the author could have further clarified the different directions of this complex interdisciplinarity and made it a more explicit component of his work. Nevertheless, it could be argued that formulating these disciplinary intersections more elaborately would have made Spurr’s study too theoretically dense and less pleasurable to read than it is. Moreover, Architecture and Modern Literature displays not only a fascinating understanding of cultural forms and fields (ranging from Babel and The Odyssey to “junkspace” and “non-lieu” and passing through The Inferno and The Arcades Project1) but also an ability to weave together architectural theory, philosophical principles, psychoanalytical insights, seminal spatial/geographical thought, and close readings of literary works (novels, poetry, and some drama). On the other hand, this study ambitiously traces the vast cultural time-space of modernity and modern literature across two centuries, while projecting its own view of modern literature and architecture’s particular horizons and transformations. Seeking to explore an originary moment for modernity, Spurr argues that [a]mong the effects of an emerging modernity in this period [late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries] are a variety of manifestations that call both literary and architectural meanings into question. These include the aesthetic of the fragment, the value placed on subjective interiority, the significance given to the human body, the development of new materials and techniques, and a conception of the past in terms of stock or reserve. (28) It is hard to agree or disagree with the specific periodization of the [End Page 701] modern in literature and architecture proposed here because of the complex aesthetic and historical questions at stake. More interestingly, the parameters of intersecting transformations and concerns, as outlined in the “variety of manifestations” above, are very well substantiated in the book’s eight chapters. Referencing Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, and Le Corbusier among others, the first chapter shows that literature’s approaches to “dwelling” have gone through several stages: “nostalgia” in the nineteenth century gave way to a “narrative and rhetorical” release from that phase as “a new consciousness of urban space” emerges “finally to a renewed confrontation with the absence of dwelling, where modern writing strives to relieve the misery of homelessness by giving thought to it” (54, 54-55). This argument is developed through readings of Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Samuel Beckett. The comparisons among the modernists here are presented succinctly: “If architecture figures in Proust as a metaphor of inner desire, it figures in Joyce as the concrete embodiment of modernity itself. Ulysses is a work that gets its characters out of the house and into the street, where they are confronted not with dwelling in its domestic sense but with their existence in urban space, the very scene of modernity” (63). In this context, Spurr wisely advises us not to confuse literary modernism, by Joyce and Woolf especially, with the “utopian manifestos of modern architecture in particular” (66). These themes are linked in many ways to the seventh chapter in which Spurr presents a primarily Heideggerian reading of building, dwelling, ruins, and the void in Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens: prominent cultural-geographical topics that Spurr revisits with...

Double Exposure

The significance of the urban observer within recent cultural and literary criticism owes much to the writings of German cultural theorist Walter Benjamin on the flâneur: essays on Baudelaire, and his large, unfinished study of Paris in the nineteenth century, the Arcades Project.1 Through the renewed interest in Benjamin since the 1980s, the flâneur has become the iconic personification of the highly developed perceptive skills of the urban observer, a connoisseur of metropolitan life, skilled at folding himself anonymously into the city streets, and priding himself in his ability to delineate the different types that made up the seemingly faceless urban crowd. Yet for many feminist theorists, noting that the experiences of women have largely been excluded from the literature of urban modernity,2 the flâneur has also been a marker of the social and gender dynamics of the urban environment. The existence of a female urban observer, or flâneuse, was anathema to the social and gender configurations of the nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century city. To loiter anonymously on the city streets of the nineteenth-century metropolis was an all but exclusively male luxury.KeywordsUrban LifeCity StreetBritish WomanWoman WriterRegent StreetThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Wandering and Placemaking in London: Iain Sinclair’s Literary Methodology

In The Arcades Project , Walter Benjamin describes the architectural expression of nineteenth century Paris as a dialectical manifestation of backwards-looking historicism and the dawn of modern industrial production (in the form of cast iron and mass produced plate glass). Yet in the same text, Benjamin refers to the dialectical image as occurring within the medium of written language. In this paper, I will first discuss the textuality of the dialectical image as it emerges from Benjamin’s discussion of allegorical and symbolic images in his Trauerspiel study and the ‘wish symbol’ in The Arcades Project. I will then discuss the ‘textual reductionism’ implicit in Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image, in which the dense pluralities of urban space are reduced to a finite script to be pieced together through Benjamin’s constructivist method of historical observation. The textuality of the dialectical image will be elaborated on by discussing it in relation to the practice of translation. This discussion will be further contextualised by discussing a cadre of German/Austrian planners and architects who attempted to translate architectural idioms between cultural identities in Kemalist Era Turkey. The article concludes with a short recapitulation on the dialectical image as both an object of scrutiny and a method of observation, one which also takes into consideration the specific historicity of the observer.

Architecture and Modern Literature explores the representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of showing how literary production and architectural construction are related as cultural forms in the historical context of modernity. In addressing this subject, it also examines the larger questions of the relation between literature and architecture and the extent to which these two arts define one another in the social and philosophical contexts of modernity. Architecture and Modern Literature will serve as a foundational introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary study of architecture and literature. David Spurr addresses a broad range of material, including literary, critical, and philosophical works in English, French, and German, and proposes a new historical and theoretical overview of this area, in which modern forms of "meaning" in architecture and literature are related to the discourses of being, dwelling, and homelessness.

Architecture and Modern Literature explores the representation and interpretation of architectural space in modern literature from the early nineteenth century to the present, with the aim of showing how literary production and architectural construction are related as cultural forms in the historical context of modernity. In addressing this subject, it also examines the larger questions of the relation between literature and architecture and the extent to which these two arts define one another in the social and philosophical contexts of modernity. Architecture and Modern Literature will serve as a foundational introduction to the emerging interdisciplinary study of architecture and literature.

Traces de terre, traces d'encre... La rappresentazione dello spazio nella letteratura caraibica. (Francofona e Anglofona)

In the second half of the 19th century, the prose poem was associated with literary modernity, especially after Baudelaire’s Le spleen de Paris, in which the French capital is represented in its everyday aspects. By practicing this literary genre, J.-K. Huysmans proposes aesthetic questions similar to Baudelaire’s, especially related to the aesthetics of the banal but inserted in a naturalist proposal. In them, the representation of urban space and its different facets is associated by painting and drawing descriptions, contributing to the literary creation of the myth of modern Paris. The indecisive and errant form of the prose poem seems the most appropriate for this literary object. From the point of view of a narrator-flâneur narrates the unforeseen events and contingencies of living in a modern city, in places of entertainment or in secret and degraded spaces.

In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin describes the architectural expression of nineteenth century Paris as a dialectical manifestation of backwards-looking historicism and the dawn of modern industrial production (in the form of cast iron and mass produced plate glass). Yet in the same text, Benjamin refers to the dialectical image as occurring within the medium of written language. In this paper, I will first discuss the textuality of the dialectical image as it emerges from Benjamin’s discussion of allegorical and symbolic images in his Trauerspiel study and the ‘wish symbol’ in The Arcades Project. I will then discuss the ‘textual reductionism’ implicit in Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image, in which the dense pluralities of urban space are reduced to a finite script to be pieced together through Benjamin’s constructivist method of historical observation. The textuality of the dialectical image will be elaborated on by discussing it in relation to the practice of translation. This discussion will be further contextualised by discussing a cadre of German/Austrian planners and architects who attempted to translate architectural idioms between cultural identities in Kemalist Era Turkey. The article concludes with a short recapitulation on the dialectical image as both an object of scrutiny and a method of observation, one which also takes into consideration the specific historicity of the observer.

In the 1990s postmodernism as a literary phenomenon led to the development of a lively literary discourse in Afrikaans. However, in contemporary narrative criticism postmodernism rarely features as a theoretical framework for studies of new Afrikaans writing. In poetry criticism postmodernism still enjoys some currency, whereas some critics hold the position that there should be stronger acknowledgement of modernist elements in the development of Afrikaans poetry. In an effort to grasp the manifestation of postmodernism in contemporary Afrikaans prose, this article focuses on globalisation and modernism as two unique challenges to thinking about postmodernism that prevail in Etienne van Heerden’s novel In stede van die liefde (In Cities of Love, 2005). The article identifies three problems in theoretical reflections about postmodernism, namely a too narrowly conceived view of postmodernism, a lack of recognition of the continuities between modernism and postmodernism, and the resulting neglect of modernism. Furthermore, the article offers a critical interrogation of globalisation in its guise as a new master narrative in the light of recent developments in the postmodern era. Through a reading of Van Heerden’s novel, the interrogation focuses on the motifs of slippage and substitution in In stede van die liefde. The representation of space in the novel includes both the urban and the rural and points to ‘glocalisation’, a term that refers to the interconnection between the local and the global. The author proposes that globalisation in the guise of a diffuse and multidimensional master narrative, produces a yearning for older master narratives leading to the reaffirmed presence of modernist elements in a manifestly postmodernist novel such as In stede van die liefde. The challenge is to acknowledge modernist elements in contemporary literature using a theoretical approach that exhaustively accounts for the link between postmodernism and globalisation – new manifestations of modernism can no longer be examined with outdated theories about modernist literature.

The Cult of Artistry in Zelda Fitzgerald's <i>Save Me the Waltz</i>