Narrative, Temporality and the Modernist City

Dragoş Ivana

Abstract


The article explores the idea of temporality in relation to high-modernist literary representations of London. I claim that the modernist metropolis appears as a palimpsest whose memorialising function is upheld by techniques such as fragmentation, citation, myth, allegory, intertextual references or allusions, which question the stereotypical relationship between then and now, subject and site. It does so by deconstructing traditional temporal sequences and by foregrounding a subtle connection between past and present. Thus, the modernist city will be considered as a space of transformation in which the substantialness of space and subjective time translates the elusive meaning of contemporary history.    

  


Keywords


the modernist city; London; palimpsest; subjective time; contemporary history

Full Text:

PDF

References


Bakhtin, M. (1981). The Dialogical Imagination: Four Essays (C. Emerson & M. Holquist, Trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.

Baudelaire, C. (1995). The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (J. Mayne, Trans.). London: Phaidon Press.

Bradbury, M. (1991). London 1890-1920. In M. Bradbury, & J. McFarlane (Eds.) Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930 (pp. 172-190). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Chambers, I. (1990). Border Dialogues: Journeys in Postmodernity. London, New York: Routledge.

De Certeau, M. (1988). The Practice of Everyday Life (S. Rendall, Trans.). Berkeley: University of California Press.

Eagleton, T. (1978). Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso.

Eliot, T. S. (1969). The Complete Poems and Plays. London: Faber and Faber.

Eliot, T. S. (1975). Ulysses, Panorama, and Myth. In F. Kermode (Ed.), Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (pp. 175-178). New York: Harcourt.

Ford, M. F. (1995). The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City. London: Dent.

Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and Time (E. Robinson & J. Macquarrie, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

James, H. (2011). English Hours: A Portrait of a Country. London: Tauris Parke Paperbacks.

Kermode, F. (2000). The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kwinter, S. (2001). Architectures of Time: Toward a Theory of the Event in Modernist Culture. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Lefebvre, H. (2011). The Production of Space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford: Blackwell.

Lynch, K. (1960). The Image of the City. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

McIntire, G. (2008). Modernism, Memory, and Desire: T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Morrison, S. (2015). Geographies of Space: Mapping and Reading the Cityscape. In G. McIntire (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to The Waste Land (pp. 24-38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781107279612.003.

Olivier, A. B., & McNeillie A. (Eds.). (1978). The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Vol. 2. New York: Harcourt.

Parsons, D. (2000). Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Phillips, L. (2006). London Narratives: Post-war Fiction and the City. London and New York: Continuum.

Tromanhauser, V. (2004). Virginia Woolf’s London and the Archaeology of Character. In L. Phillips (Ed.), The Swarming Streets: Twentieth-Century Literary Representations of London (pp. 33-43). Amsterdam, New York: Rodopi.

Weinstein, A. (2006). Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison. New York: Random House.

Weinstein, A. (2014). Fragment and Form in the City of Modernism. In K. R. McNamara (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature (pp. 138-152). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wolfreys, J. (2007). Writing London: Inventions of the City: Vol. 3. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Woolf, V. (1966). Street Haunting: A London Adventure. In L. Woolf (Ed.), The Collected Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4 (pp. 155-167). London: Hogarth Press.

Woolf, V. (1990). Mrs Dalloway. San Diego: Harcourt.

Woolf, V. (2004, August 11). Portrait of a Londoner. The Guardian. Retrieved February 25, 2020, from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/aug/11/virginiawoolf.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17951/lsmll.2020.44.2.123-131
Date of publication: 2020-07-14 13:48:39
Date of submission: 2020-02-28 08:40:17


Statistics


Total abstract view - 1217
Downloads (from 2020-06-17) - PDF - 541

Indicators



Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright (c) 2020 Dragos Ivana

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.