Writing the City Looking Within, Looking Without

Email

Whatsapp

Facebook

Pinterest

Twitter

Copy link

About the Book Writing the City is a collection of essays that portrays both the commonalities and the diversity of the cities of contemporary South Asia. Through their deeply personal accounts, the contributors of this volume seek to explore the relationship of their writings to place and space and thus present the myriad ways in which city-spaces are created in literature today, Food, travel, architecture, education, memories, political turmoil and a deep sense of nostalgia come together in this collection to provide vivid and vibrant accounts of the authors' creative journeys, while also making it a literary repertoire chronicling the changing face of the times and places we inhabit.

About the Author Stuti Khanna is an Associate Professor of Literature at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. She obtained her Master's degree from Delhi University and her D. Phil. from Oxford University. She is the author of the monograph The Contemporary Novel and the City: Re-conceiving Notional and Narrative Form (2013). She is interested in the ways in which postcolonial urbanity in South Asia inflects and shapes twentieth-century narratives.

Introduction Few writers have written with the clarity and insight of the German sociologist Georg Simmel, of the far-reaching impact of place on personality-both individual and collective-in his classic essay The Metropolis and Mental Life' (1902). Writing about a rapidly growing Berlin at the turn of the last century, Simmel marshals tools from economics, psychology and sociology to posit a compelling picture of the 'metropolitan type', one who must shield her or his 'soul' from the 'rapid intensification of nervous stimuli' that surrounds it, by cultivating a 'blasé' attitude that is reluctant to engage with the multiplicity of sensory phenomena thrust upon it from all sides by the momentum of urban life. What is remarkable about this piece is the compelling immediacy with which it speaks to us, over a hundred years after it was written. Even as Simmel writes, somewhat despairingly, of the ways in which capitalist modernity has imparted to everyday life and interaction between individuals a quality of superficiality and calculation, one cannot but be struck by the immense energy and seductive power of the madly mutating cityscape, transforming those who live in it into colliding atoms of ceaseless, frenzied activity.