Abstract
The current paper has been developed to examine the complexities of metropolitan subjects’ blasé attitude and bloodless life as portrayed in James Joyce’s “A Painful Case” and Yusuf Idrīs’s “Qāʿ al-Madīna” [“The Bottom of the City”] short stories. The paper aims at analyzing the impact of metropolis on its bloodless characters’ mental health and perception of self through the unpacking of the blasé attitude which emerges in Georg Simmel’s famous study “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” Using Simmel’s study as a tool to analyze the two short stories, the paper will comment on and compare the manner in which the Irish and the Egyptian urban texts decipher the code of their modern metropoles to interpret in what ways Simmel’s insights illuminate our understanding of the dilemma of the metropolitan subject. In this paper the urban and literary theory will complement each other in shedding light on the emergence of new forms of socialization. The paper reaches the conclusion that the overall image of the metropolis portrayed in the two short stories was constructed through the mutilated sensibilities of the metropolitan subjects that have become dispirited by the routine of their daily lives. The two protagonists – Mr. Duffy and Mr. Abdallah - end up living like strangers who maintain minimal comunication with others due the cold and unfeeling rationality they adopt to protect themselves against the overstimulation of their dehumanizing metropoles.
Highlights
IntroductionCities’ roles have evolved from just being the seat of governance to being political and cultural powerhouses and vast concentrations of economic activities
1 Since the Greek philosopher Plato produced The Republic around 375 BC and Ibn Khaldun, the Muslim thinker and founder of modern sociology, histography and demography, ‘ilm al’umran’ in the fourteenth century, the city has become the backdrop to literature whether in the West or the East
My argument in this paper is that the portrayal of both Joyce and Idris of the metropoles correspond to Simmel’s sociological inquiries about the fate of the metropolitan subject
Summary
Cities’ roles have evolved from just being the seat of governance to being political and cultural powerhouses and vast concentrations of economic activities. It is the rise of the modern city in the 18th century characterized by money economy, detailed division of labor, and exchange value, that has taken its toll on the mentality of the urbanites, the nature of the relationships among them, and social space. The ascendancy of the metropolis with its inhuman, debasing social environment has created hostility in the literary imagination This explains why the history of modernity has been intertwined from the beginning with the motif of anti-urbanism, which is responsible for the unfavourable depiction of the metropolis as a dark place of social disintegration, degenerate materialism, and catastrophic abandonment, inhabited by “bloodless characters.”. Simmel (1858-1918), the German urban sociologist, and philosopher describes these characters as the blasé metropolitan subjects that are characterized by indifference, intellectuality, and abstraction
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
