THE WOMAN OF THE CROWD: Urban displacement and failed encounters in surrealist and postmodern writing. (Postmodern Studies 28) (Postmodern Studies, 28)

This book traces the origins of the Postmodern eclectic grammar of linguistic collision back in the Surrealist poetics of ruins. Keeping in mind the images of lost direction in the big city as a central figure in the discussion of both the Modern and Postmodern aesthetics of displacement, Daniele starts comparing the epiphanic encounters of the Baudelairian flâneur in metropolitan Paris - in constant search for the traces of a lost symbolic order - with Breton's enigmatic pursuit of Nadja, the elusive sphinx in the crowd who moves in a mental territory of puzzling condensations and of ineffable objets trouvé. In his visual and written work, Marcel Duchamp was probably the first artist to envision the space of the crowd as a trans-urban, multiple dimension: a cool arena of disjunctive encounters contributing to transform the Surrealist erotic space of desire in a cooler, open field of performance. Deeply influenced by Duchamp's hybrid aesthetics, American Postmodern writers such as Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, and the performance artist Laurie Anderson, represent metropolis as a “geographical incest”, as a plural, entropic semiosphere which transcends the notion of urban community to become the tolerant receptacle of an ethnic and discoursive multiplicity, an electronic area of linguistic collisions translatable in new fragmented and unfinished narratives. Evoking the assemblages of Abstract Expressionists, the debris of Simon Rodia “junk art”, and the hybrid language of Postmodern architecture, this neo-Surrealist narrative discourse transforms the epiphanic traces envisioned by the Baudelairian and Bretonian heroes in partial parodies, in enigmatic fragments whose ultimate source transcends the narrator's knowledge. The conceptual strategy which is constitutive of these texts implicitly asks the puzzled reader to disentangle the entropic plots, immerging him in the midst of a “linguistic wilderness,” where all opposites - fact and fiction, man and machine, man and female - enigmatically and humorously coexist. Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Foreword and Acknowledgements Introduction Chapter 1 Reading fragments in the entropic city: Baudelaire, Breton and the pursuit of the sphinx in the crowd Chapter 2 On the frontier of nonsense: Breton’s Nadja and the failed encounter Chapter 3 Marcel Duchamp/Rrose Sélavy: the artist as transvestite and the corrosive encounter of opposites in space Chapter 4 Sites of dismemberment: zones, nowhere places and the end of the quest in American Postmodern fiction Chapter 5 A linguistic wilderness: maps in ruins in Thomas Pynchon’s post-industrial zones Chapter 6 The collage city and the displaced narrator in the short stories of Donald Barthelme Chapter 7 Electronic bodies and humor in Laurie Anderson’s empty places Bibliography Daniela Daniele. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 199-221).