Urban phenomena as "sites of memory" in "Open City" by Teju Cole

Abstract

The purpose of the work is to analyze the autofictional novel by the modern American writer Teju Cole "Open City" using memory studies' optics. Relevance is ensured by an appeal to one of the most important genres of modern literature, autofiction, which combines and fundamentally non-distinguishes documentary and fictional discourses, and the use of the methodological apparatus of the cross-disciplinary sphere of memory studies. The subject of the study is the urban chronotope of New York after the 9/11 terrorist attack and its specific memorial loci. The artistic text in this case acts as a medial representation of reality, and the urban space in it is perceived and can be analyzed as a text. One of the founders of memory studies is French scientist Pierre Nora, whose term "sites of memory" becomes the basis in this work. The narrator of the novel "Open City," Julius, in the process of flaring through New York, perceives the city as a semiotic space, reading the markers of the urban chronotope as memorable and/or historical signs. "Sites of memory," located at the junction of living memory and frozen history, become the most important loci that fix the individual and collective commentary of social history, while being pushed out of the sphere of relevance into the sphere of the forgotten, whilst the narrator of the novel occupies an intermediate position due to the ability to reactualize historical events and memorial narratives, albeit only at the personal level. Such a comparison of "I" and "others" allows to address the issue of national identity and reveal the specifics of the American nation as focused on the future, and not on the past, and erasing the "Sites of memory" from contemporaneity.