| This dissertation explores literary and theoretical representations of the relations between objects and experience in the modern city. James Joyce's Ulysses and Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project form the core of the project, which also addresses city writings by Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Charles Baudelaire, Edouard Dujardin and Louis Aragon. In these texts, an increased sense of social fragmentation coincides with a new focus on the relationships between people and things. As narrative conventions are destabilized, descriptive, enumerative and successive modes emerge. If Joyce is often seen as departing from nineteenth century fictional practices and Ulysses is understood as separate from the writings of the European avant-garde, reading the novel in this literary and theoretical context sencourages us to see it as taking on European-wide questions of consumer capitalism and literary production. Reading Benjamin's Arcades Project with these literary texts allows us to understand his rewriting of concepts such as reification and commodity fetishism and his use of fragmented, accretive and open-ended form. |
