This work is a string of essays that aesthetically frames estrangement as the quintessential experience of modern culture. Accordingly, detachment and distance are themes that persist throughout these essays. They weave their way through the cultural, social, psychological, and spatial dimensions of modern life, but at a tentative remove. Such a level of generality precludes any claims of the work to be a methodical dissection of the subject matter. Neither is it a series of literature reviews or response letters to canonical essays. It is, primarily, a literary reflection on the matter; an assemblage of evocative rhetoric that dramatizes the experience of modern estrangement. Each passage is written as a commentary that insecurely hovers between the categories listed above. What all these evasions enable in turn is a text that mirrors the attitude of the dilettante, comfortably flitting between passages that trail off from the lingering mood of one essay to the next. The work of a handful of German cultural theorists of the early 20th century supply the primary sources to this reflection, and what I have tried to draw from a selection of their writings is a mental state that tries to peer through the opacity of the metropolitan spectacle. The mood that is meant to be evoked here is the obverse of the glamour and excitement associated with the imagined social life of the big city. Urban is a word that has seen its definition drowned out by the associative imagery around it; in other words, its connotations overwhelm what the term is meant to denote. The psychological counter-pole to such imagery is the characteristically urban disposition that is marked by a refusal to be dazzled. This sort of disinterestedness directly feeds into the endless pursuit of the new, and the compulsion to seek a lost sense of wonderment. In what is to follow, I have tried to find resonance with the notion of the urban on such a note of resignation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:kth-287277 |
| Date | January 2020 |
| Creators | Rehman, Mohammad Munib |
| Publisher | KTH, Urbana och regionala studier |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | TRITA-ABE-MBT ; 20765 |
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