“Nos llevó el ensanche”: Medellín en las novelas urbanas de Manuel Mejía Vallejo

The Colombian writer Manuel Mejía Vallejo published between 1973 and 1987 a series of urban novels about the image of his city: Medellín. This paper analyzes the narration of urban space around three central motifs: progress, uprooting and nostalgia. It also studies how the novelist narrates the symbolic erased of the citizen and the devastation of the traditional city due to the expansion of the streets and the uncontrolled demolition of the neighborhoods. For the characters of these novels, memory is the only way to maintain their identity within the logic of a modern city.

Dzielnica jako miejsca afektywne – Cwaniary Sylwii Chutnik i Królowa Salwatora Emmy Popik

The article analyzes two urban novels Cwaniary by Sylwia Chutnik and Królowa Salwatora by Emma Popik. Both present the vision of city as an affective place. Their strongest similarity is in the way they project emotions upon the city and the transformations of public space which they document. The author of the article proposes to concentrate on a number of questions. These include the affective experience of urban space, polis as the space of ideological tensions, relationship between the centre and periphery, postmodern understanding of locality, and finally, the status of a district as the site of settling in, which allows one to claim “the right to the city”.

Peripheral Urbanism, Imperial Maturity, and the Crisis of Development in Lao She's Rickshaw and Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie

The theory of combined and uneven development has provided a new interpretive framework for studies of the novel in recent years, opening up connections between the central premise that capitalism produces an “amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms” and modernist experiments with narrative time. This article locates antidevelopmental narratives in the uneven culture of the peripheral metropolis, focusing on two twentieth-century urban novels: Lao She's Rickshaw (1936–37) and Mulk Raj Anand's Coolie (1936). Tracing the journeys of migrant workers engaged in informal labor in Peking (Beijing) and Bombay (Mumbai), respectively, the novels juxtapose the visual cultures of colonial modernization with everyday, arresting experiences of poverty and precarity on the city streets. In staging the untimely deaths of their rickshaw-pulling protagonists, they not only interrupt individual developmental trajectories but also challenge the progressive telos underpinning discourses of “imperial maturity” in their respective cities. Central to this challenge is the rickshaw itself, as both a symbol of uneven development and a vehicle that literally and metaphorically drags the protagonists back, bringing an abrupt end to the journey to maturity and, consequently, to the narrative arc of the bildungsroman. In this way, the novels' proto-postcolonial formal interventions are grounded in the visible unevenness of their urban settings.

Stages of modernity in perspective: Jane Austen’s Pride and prejudice and José de Alencar’s Senhora

In the nineteenth century, England was one of the countries with a decisive influence on the formation of modern bourgeois society. Brazil experienced this process very unevenly and in particular ways. Jane Austen’s fiction and José de Alencar’s urban novels formalize important aspects of this formative process for both bourgeois society and the accompanying mindset in England and in Brazil respectively. A comparison of Austen’s Pride and prejudice and Alencar’s Senhora reveals similarities and differences between the narratives which point to meaningful contextual aspects of the broader modernizing process. Analysis of the relationship between point of view and the protagonists in both novels reveals specific socio-cultural rationales that the readers of both Austen and Alencar were encouraged to follow. In this sense, comparative study of the novels also discloses less obvious aspects of the formation of the modern bourgeois mindset in their different but related national and socio-cultural contexts.

Asian-Americans in New York: Two Men’s Adventures in Immigrant-Land

Gish Jen’s Typical American and Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker are two essentially urban novels that focus on issues of (ethnic) identity construction and performativity in metropolitan New York, at the end of the twentieth century. Belonging to two distinct immigrant communities (Chinese and Korean), their protagonists are Americans in the making, whose personal evolutions and involutions are shaped by the social and cultural dilemmas of transition and (mal)adjustment. The present article scrutinizes the fictional interplay of public and private (hi)stories and discourses, and analyzes the ways in which stereotypical definitions and representations of otherness, investigations and exploitations of memory, and manipulations of individual and communal belief are called upon to illustrate the intricate mechanisms of contemporary United States. Citizenship, ethnicity, education, language, power relations, discrimination, consumerism and, last but not least, politics, are important elements that this comparative approach questions. By studying the two novels together, the article argues that the two writers capture different, yet equally relevant hypostases of the (Asian) immigrant’s self-questioning and self-inscription into the American nation, whose updated versions of the “Dream” have been dominated by the material rather than the spiritual concerns.