A Year in the City is a mosaic novel set in contemporary an historical Sydney. It is 70, 000 words long, and contains twelve different narratives, with the American author Mark Twain appearing as a fictional character in the opening and closing. A Year in the City seeks to represent the fragmented, multicultural nature of Sydney through a diverse range of narrators and styles. Each of the chapters is linked through the themes of belonging, race, land ownership. The Sydney portrayed in the novel is what Leonie Sandercock called a Mongrel City, a metaphor used to characterise the "new urban condition in which difference, otherness, fragmentation, splintering, multiplicity, heterogeneity, diversity, [and] plurality prevail." A Year in the City intends to celebrate cultural and racial heterogeneity. It is accompanied by a research dissertation of 30, 000 words, that investigates the project of writing about the city and the theme of race. It explores the imagined city through the work of James Donald and Ross Gibson, and addresses the challenge of capturing the lived experience in text, as theorised by Henri Lefebvre. The mosaic structure of A Year in the City borrows from Michel de Certeau's theory of walking the city and Walter Benjamin's flaneur. The issue of race is discussed in relation to the representation of white and non-white characters against the dominant white society.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/234203 |
| Date | January 2006 |
| Creators | Peek, Benjamin Michael, School of English, UNSW |
| Publisher | Awarded by:University of New South Wales. School of English |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | Copyright Benjamin Michael Peek, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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