%0 Journal Article
%T Alienation and the City, or, How to Find and Lose Yourself in Berlin and Kars
%A William Fysh
%J Opticon1826
%D 2008
%I Ubiquity Press
%R 10.5334/opt.050802
%X In Konvolut M of the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin comments instructively on the duality of the city as experienced by the flaneur. He writes: ¡®the city splits for him into dialectical poles. It opens up to him as a landscape, even as it closes around him as a room¡¯ (Benjamin, trans. Eiland and McLaughlin, 1999, 417). The implications of this are several. The dialectical poles are on the one hand spatial - indicators of the flexibility of self-location in the city. However, they are also metaphysical and meta-poetic. The city offers the possibility for a blending of personal and collective memories; for an opening of the mind to a ¡®landscape¡¯ of social interaction or a retreat of the soul into its own isolated ¡®room¡¯; for the injection of a creative impulse or the projection of psychological and experiential stagnation. This study examines the impact of these dialectical poles on ideas of selfhood, loss and memory in Cees Nooteboom¡¯s All Souls¡¯ Day and Orhan Pamuk¡¯s Snow.
%K cities
%K selfhood
%K loss
%K memory
%U http://www.opticon1826.com/article/view/79