Refine
Year of publication
- 2011 (10) (remove)
Document Type
- Article (7)
- Monograph/Edited Volume (2)
- Postprint (1)
Language
- English (10) (remove)
Is part of the Bibliography
- yes (10)
Institute
- Institut für Romanistik (10) (remove)
Acknowlegements
(2011)
Urbanity and literature
(2011)
Transarea studies focus upon spaces as created by the movements that criss-cross them. From this point of view, from its very beginnings, literature is closely interrelated with a vectorial (and much less with a purely spatial) conception of history - and with urbanity, which plays a decisive role in Gilgamesh's travels through a (narrative) cosmos centered upon the city of Uruk. This article explores the city as a transareal space of movement in three examples of literature, with no fixed abode, around the turn of the millennium, i.e. Assia Djebar's Les Nuits de Strasbourg, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar's Istanbul-Berlin Trilogy, and Cecile Wajsbrot's L'ile aux musees. These three writers project, in a very specific way, cities in motion as anagrammatic and fractal structures.
Transarea studies focus upon spaces as created by the movements that criss-cross them. From this point of view, from its very beginnings, literature is closely interrelated with a vectorial (and much less with a purely spatial) conception of history - and with urbanity, which plays a decisive role in Gilgamesh's travels through a (narrative) cosmos centered upon the city of Uruk. This article explores the city as a transareal space of movement in three examples of literature, with no fixed abode, around the turn of the millennium, i.e. Assia Djebar's Les Nuits de Strasbourg, Emine Sevgi Oezdamar's Istanbul-Berlin Trilogy, and Cecile Wajsbrot's L'ile aux musees. These three writers project, in a very specific way, cities in motion as anagrammatic and fractal structures.
This essay shows in what sense Alexander von Humboldt created a new discourse on the New World. In his view of the Americas, he was able to subvert the dominantly spatial history of the 'new hemisphere' found in Cornelius de Pauw or Guillaume-Thomas Raynal by introducing dynamic and vectorial structures that allow us to focus on the Americas not as 'the other' but as a highly interrelated part of the world. Humboldt's Weltbewusstsein ('world consciousness') develops a new discourse that can be best understood as a complex answer to the second period of accelerated globalisation.