Stone upon stone: land, labour and consciousness in world-literaturary perspective
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.11606/va.i40.173466Keywords:
World literature, Comparative literature, Literary theoryAbstract
The story of a young man (or woman) who comes from the provinces to the city to look for work – this is one of the central topoi of modern fiction. In novel after novel, we are shown the centripetal force of the city. The city’s restless, jagged and unceasing transformation through modernization is then overdetermined in these country-to-city literary narratives through being represented under the sign of the shock of the new, as the rural protagonists are made to confront its pace, size, intensity, abruptness, and callous impersonality. The city is so transparently the dominant locus of modernization in the capitalist world-system, in contrast, the countryside is represented as a depleted matrix, less and less capable of sustaining life, not only affectively or experientially, but also often literally.
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