Metropolitan Writing in the Age of Urbanisation (4/5):

Manhattan Transfer (Second and Third Sections)Borges, Buenos Aires and the Surreal

Ancient and Supermodern Cairo

Jason Finch, 4 November 2015

Catch-up

• Next week: last class, you present on one topic from the course and we discuss essay progress

• Reading reports from past weeks (five in total for course: Dickens/London, Zola/Paris, Dos Passos/New York, Borges/Buenos Aires, various writers/Cairo– Questions?

• Essay progress?– Titles and topics, reading ...

1. Manhattan Transfer (Third Section and overall view)

Above left: tramps, New York, 1920sAbove right: wealthy couple, New York, 1920s

Think about visual images in the book in relation to characters / plot / social commentary (examples: Third Section)

Left: New York, 1900 (viewed as Manhattan below Harlem plus the closest portions of Brooklyn and New Jersey)

352: ‘Through the smell of the arbutus she caught for a second the smell of his unwashed body, the smell of immigrants, of Ellis Island, of crowded tenements’

Marked on map:

Upper East Side;

14th Street (northern boundary of Lower Manhattan);

Lower East Side;

Greenwich Village;

Financial District

Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986)

• These stories written: c. 1940• Anglophile, time abroad• Later head of the National

Library in Buenos Aires• Impact in America and

Europe mid-1950s onwards (‘postmodern’ fictions of Pynchon, Eco)

Buenos Aires• Founded by Spanish

colonists, 1536 / destroyed / again, 1580

• As magnet for European immigrants (especially from Italy and Spain) in the early C20

• Railway hub in early twentieth century

Georgio de Chirico (1888-1978, Greece/Italy), The Disquieting Muses (1916)

Next: Paul Delvaux (1897-1994, Belgium), Loneliness (1956)

Borges and the Surreal

• The modern city emptied of people• Juxtapositions of things from the past with the

apparent present• Recognizably ‘realist’ and yet utterly strange

• Ideology of surrealism (1920s Paris): the real electrified; incorporation of dreams and the unconscious

Borges, ‘The Argentine Writer and Tradition’

What is our Argentine tradition? I believe we can answer this question easily and that there is no problem here. I believe our tradition is all of Western culture, and I also believe we have a right to this tradition, greater than that which the inhabitants of one or another Western nation might have. I recall here an essay of Thorstein Veblen, the North American sociologist, on the pre-eminence of Jews in Western culture. He asks if this preeminence allows us to conjecture about the innate superiority of the Jews, and answers in the negative; he says that they are outstanding in Western culture because they act within that culture and, at the same time, do not feel tied to it by any special devotion; "for that reason," he says, "a Jew will always find it easier than a non-Jew to make innovations in Western culture"; and we can say the same of the Irish in English culture. In the case of the Irish, we have no reason to suppose that the profusion of Irish names in British literature and philosophy is due to any racial pre-eminence, for many of those illustrious Irishmen (Shaw, Berkeley, Swift) were the descendants of Englishmen, were people who had no Celtic blood; however, it was sufficient for them to feel Irish, to feel different, in order to be innovators in English culture. I believe that we Argentines, we South Americans in general, are in an analogous situation; we can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences.

Changing CairoLeft, from Sabry Hafez, ‘The New Egyptian Novel: Urban Transformation and Narrative Form’ , New Left Review 64 (2010), www.newleftreview.org/assets/images/2980301.gif

Geography and Literary Form

The Literature of Cairo

• Map from Mehrez book• Stories: – 1. from Gorgy, Cairo Is a Small City– 2. from Hamamsy, Zamalek– 3. from Mahfouz, Midaq Alley– 4. from Shalaby, Wedding Thief– 5. from Ibrahim, Sharaf– 6. from Tawfik, Murder in the Tower of Happiness– 7. from Bakr, Thirty-One Beautiful Green Trees

Finishing the course• Research plan: working title, research question / hypothesis,

literature list, time plan

• Next week, last class, presentation from each of you (one of the previous weeks’ books / cities; an aspect not discussed so far; different from your essay: relate that work to the others on the course and the histories of urbanization; today (30.10) discuss which work that will be

• Essay deadline: end of November