Research Information System
in: Cultures of Uneven and Combined Development, James Christie and Nesrin Degirmencioglu, Editor, Brill, Leiden , Güzelyurt, pp.289-313, 2019
Abstract
The twentieth century saw capitalist growth
accelerating the pace of urban life and transforming cities ever more clearly
into sites of uneven and combined development. The result, for novelists, was
an intensification of the problem of representing urban form – both as
unmappable totality and as subjective experience of fragmentation, distraction
and unexpected connection. In
line with David Harvey’s thesis concerning the ‘space-time compression’ endemic
to modernity, I claim that not only are technological
advances in urban transport and communications reflected in the shifting
registers of novelistic characters’ perception of their environment, but that
this change in perception embodies a break with the unilinear logic of sequence
and setting to encompass what Ernst Bloch terms ‘the synchronicity of the
non-synchronous,’ or an uneven spatial simultaneity, characteristic of modern
fiction. In this chapter, by comparing the New York of John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925) with the
Istanbul of Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s Huzur
(1949), I elucidate the differential stakes of modernist representations of the
city, the core and the periphery, as the conjoining of contemporary and archaic
forms. In both novels, I argue, the motifs of music and transport function in
analogous ways – fragments of song intersect with details of urban journeys to
point up the sharply variegated and unequal terrain of the twentieth century
metropolis.