초록 열기/닫기 버튼
The problems of cities in modern civilization have been hot issues in literary studies. Quite recently literary and cultural theories have deeply concerned with space, culture and subjectivity in the literary works. In reading those spaces of capitalist cities, like London in Great Expectations and New York in The Great Gatsby, we can get closer to understanding many conflicts around modern cities, in which the consciousness of subjects is controlled by a variety of cultural effects from the city space with an exchange value. The aim of the paper is to examine the possibility of the trans-disciplinary approach to reading spaces in the novel through the so-called ‘consilience’ with the space theory in the social studies. In Production of Space, Henri Lefebvre, a French Marxist philosopher and theorist of space argues that the history of human beings has developed the four major spatial stages ‘absolute space’, ‘historical space’, ‘abstract space’ and ‘differential space.’ He claims that modern cities are ruled by the effects of the ‘abstract space’ in which modern thoughts have been developed with the rising of capitalist cities. Both London and New York are well-known as core cities where capital has been accumulated in the nineteenth and twentieth century. There have been many problems and conflicts appeared in the capital cities that spearhead cultural features and effects. In this article, the practicable approaches are also analyzed to view the problems existing in the city by comparing the two characters and the spaces of two cities in novels with “spatial practices” from Lefebvre’s theory of space.
키워드열기/닫기 버튼
Great Expectations, The Great Gatsby, Space, Culture, Subjectivity, Henri Lefebvre, City, New York, London, Capitalism
