Mapless cities: Urban displacement and failed encounters in Surrealist and Post modern narratives.
Item
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Title
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Mapless cities: Urban displacement and failed encounters in Surrealist and Post modern narratives.
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Identifier
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AAI9224802
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identifier
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9224802
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Creator
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Daniele, Daniela.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Vincent Crapanzano
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Date
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1992
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Literature, Comparative | Literature, American | Literature, Romance | Fine Arts
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Abstract
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My study traces the origins of the Postmodern eclectic grammar of linguistic collision back in the Surrealist monstruous poetics of ruins. Keeping in mind the images of lost direction in the big city as a central figure in the discussion of both the Modern and Postmodern aesthetics of displacement, I start comparing the epiphanic encounters of the Baudelairean flaneur in metropolitan Paris--in constant search for the traces of a lost symbolic order--with the Bretonian enigmatic pursuit of Nadja, the elusive sphinx in the crowd who discourages the poet's self-recognition in a mental territory of puzzling condensations and of ineffable objet trouve. In both his visual and written work, Marcel Duchamp was probably the first to envision the space of the crowd as a trans-urban, multiple dimension: a cool arena of disjunctive encounters contributing to transform the Surrealist erotic space of desire in a cooler, open field of performance.;Deeply influenced by Duchamp's hybrid aesthetics, American Postmodern writers such as Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, and the performance artist Laurie Anderson, represent metropolis as a "geographical incest", as plural, entropic semiosphere which transcends the very notion of urban community to become the tolerant receptacle of an ethnic and discoursive multiplicity, an electronic area of linguistic collisions translatable in new fragmented and unfinished narratives. Evoking the assemblages of Abstract Expressionists, the debris of Simon Rodia "junk art", and the hybrid language of Postmodern architecture, this neo-Surrealist narratives discourse transforms the allegorical, epiphanic traces envisioned by the Baudelairean and Bretonian heroes in partial parodies, in enigmatic fragments of discourse whose ultimate source transcends the narrator's knowledge. The conceptual strategy which is constitutive of these texts implicitly asks the puzzled reader to disentangle the entropic plots, immerging him in the midst of a "linguistic wilderness," where all opposites--fact and fiction, man and machine, man and female--enigmatically and humorously coexist.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
