Urban/e forms of narrative consciousness: Concentric memory, eccentric madness and the making of the modern novel (Nikolai Gogol, Russia, Machado de Assis, Brazil, Victor Hugo, Marcel Proust, France)

Modernist fiction confronts cultural crises concentrated in urban contexts and urbane consciousness through an anxiously recursive and digressive, dissembling and dissenting sentence, acutely aware of its period, but reaching beyond it through a paradoxical inward turn. This study discovers peculiar cultural correspondences in the schizophrenic displacement, paranoid projection, and pathological forms of memory that differently shape modernist narratives at the center and on the margins of Europe. It redefines the domain and dynamics of modernism (socio-historical, geographical, and generic) by focusing on the formative presence of the city and “citytext” in reflexive fictions by Hugo, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Machado de Assis, and Proust, for whose refractory narrators the city serves not only as pretext and context, but as a semiotic construct underpinning discrete modes of modern narrative construction and cultural self-definition.; I lay the groundwork for close readings in critical surveys of Paris, St. Petersburg and Rio citytexts. I draw out distinctions between concentric and eccentric cultural consciousness by considering how Bakhtin's theories of speech genres, dialogue, and literary chronotope, and the semiotics of the culture developed by writers such as Simmel and Benjamin, Schwarz, Toporov and Lotman intersect within and illumine self-consciously realized citytexts. I find that the alienation of the self and authorial anxieties characteristic of modernist fiction are generated in concentric narrative by creative but pathological remembering of the self and the city, and in eccentric narrative by the capacity to turn to imaginative uses urban displacement and doubling, digression and contradiction. While pursuing a social stylistics called for but not realized by Bakhtin, I contend against Bakhtin's reading of underground narrative, arguing for the creative capacities of cornered consciousness. I develop more fully his and Mário de Andrade's concepts of polyphonic narrative in the spatial terms delineated by Lotman and Schwarz, turning into the interiors explored by Brazilian and Russian modermsms.; My introductory and final chapters consider how these discrete pathological models of urbane consciousness elucidate modernist works by Bely, Barreto, Proust, Woolf and Pessoa. I trace a slanted line transecting twentieth-century Russian and Luso-Brazilian fictions by writers such as Lispector, Lins, Petrushevskaia, and Makine—narratives informed by complex intertextual dialogue, political reversals, cultural displacement, and sexual consciousness. I find the eccentric line encompassing, redefining the core, and the intercourse of “concentric memory” and “eccentric madness” capable of re-membering and re-placing the novel as a genre for our time.