EccentriCities : writing in the margins of modernism : St. Petersburg to Rio de Janeiro

Eccentric creative consciousness is marked by the many contradictions inherent in being cast on the margins of paradoxically marginocentric geo-cultural sites. This book seeks to bring greater clarity to discrete urbane architectonics of modernist literature within a distended Western (including Slavic and Latin American) tradition. It traces different slants of the rational plane in modernist fictions by rupturing, deconstructing and reconstructing consciousness along differently temporalized and spatialized axes respectively aligned with concentric and eccentric cultural construction. The book redefines some of the dimensions, dynamics, creative capacities and critical contributions of discrete literary modernisms - concentric, but especially, eccentric. A distinction is made between pathologically memoried and mad (particularly manic and paranoid schizophrenic) modes of cultural consciousness, concentrated in reflexive citytexts respectively located at the centre of European modernism. The book re-examines the development of literal and literary landscapes underpinning paranoid schizophrenic constructions of eccentric consciousness in Nikolai Gogol's and Fyodor Dostoevsky's Petersburg tales and Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis's Rio narratives. It reconsiders these works as critical and creative responses to urbane European genres as well as earlier strains of Russian and Brazilian literary and artistic representation. The book focuses on eccentric consciousnesses framing the hallucinated cities drawn by writers including Andrei Bely, Mario de Andrade, Mikhail Bulgakov, Osman Lins, Clarice Lispector and Liudmila Petrushevskaya. An innovative, interdisciplinary, incisive 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, concentrating Russian and Luso-Brazilian cultural dialogue and definition, give rise to peculiarly parallel anachronistic and alternative fictional forms. While comparatively reframing these literary traditions through an extensive survey of Russian and Brazilian literature, cartography, urban design and development, foregrounding innovative close readings of works by Gogol, Dostoevsky, Bely, Almeida, Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Mário de Andrade, the book also redefines new constellations (eccentric, concentric, ex-centric) for understanding geo-cultural and generic dimensions of modernist and post-modern literature and theory. Front matter Dedication Epigraph Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Part I Eccentricity and modernity Urban contexts, urbane consciousness and the eccentric slant of modernisms Eccentric cities and citytexts: transpositions, translations and transformations of authority and authorship Part II Eccentric narrative consciousness Gogol’s open prospects: digressive copy clerks Dostoevsky’s and Machado de Assis’s unending undergrounds: dead men writing Part III An encompassing eccentric line Hallucinated cities Postscript: theory of the novel and the eccentric novel’s early play with theory Bibliography Index 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.