This book critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites give rise to peculiarly parallel polyphonic fictional forms. It redefines new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo-cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature and theory. -- .
An innovative interdisciplinary scholarly study remapping and redefining domains and dynamics of modernism, EccentriCities: Writing in the margins of modernism critically considers how geo-historically distant and disparate urban sites give rise to peculiarly parallel polyphonic fictional forms. Rethinking the reflective relationship between eccentric capitals and recursive, reflexive, refractive, refractory writing in the margins of paradoxically colonial and colonising cities and citytexts, the study reframes seminal texts in urbane Russian and Luso-Brazilian traditions. It argues, as point of departure, that conventional Euro-centric mappings and models of an urban/e modernism fail to account for the peculiar dimensions of self-consciously eccentric modernist art and architecture, urban (re)design and literary discourse. It recasts the formative relationship between European modernist texts and writing in its margins. Exploring the development of discrete capitals and cultural discourses on opposing margins of Europe and on the edges of vast empires, EccentriCities discovers intriguing confluences between the stylised, schizophrenic construction of eccentric urban landscapes and urbane literary traditions.
Tilted through the city and citytext into consciousness, EccentriCities develops, on the other hand, a 'slanted line' of criticism, such as that invoked by Nabokov as essential to understanding the peculiar eccentricity and gravity, as much stylistic and psychological as socio-political, of Gogol's Petersburg tales. That is, this work investigates a more complex interplay between urban context and urbane narrative consciousness than that suggested by earlier studies of the 'modernist city', reading maps, lithographs, paintings and photographs alongside literary texts and theory. Comparatively reframing particular literary traditions through an extensive survey of Russian and Brazilian literature and innovative close readings of works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Almeida, Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, EccentriCities also defines new geo-cultural constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding dissent, deviance, and dialogism in modernist and post-modern literature.
