Bely, Joyce, and Doblin: Peripatetics in the City Novel

Preview:

Peter Barta offers a new perspective on the narrative apparatus in three prominent modernist European city novels. He argues that the narrative combination of rambling, thinking, observing, and talking creates a peripatetic perspective, a manner of facing oneself and the world. The book examines Andrei Belys Petersburg, James Joyces Dublin, and Alfred Dblins Berlin with special attention to the juxtaposition of details of the city with details of the characters mental wanderings. Barta sees that the city forces upon its characters psychic displacement, tensions, and oppositionsthe fragmentation characterizing much of contemporary fiction. None of the three works resolves the conflicts responsible for the restless narrative peregrinations. The city text (a maze without a center) dispossesses its characters, though they retain the desire to come to terms with their environment. In showing how three novelsBelys Petersburg, Joyces Ulysses, and Dblins Berlin Alexanderplatzillustrate idiosyncratic features of the modernist European city, Peter Barta adds a fresh dimension to our reading of urban fiction, its characters, types, and general themes.

Share the book with
your friends