Degree
Master of Arts
Program
English
Supervisor
Dr. Kim Solga
Abstract
Various works of psychogeographic literature explore privileged and non-privileged communities and spaces through narrative and character development. Novels of this sort—specifically those by China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, and J.G. Ballard—feature narratives where their respective protagonists undergo a liminal metamorphosis and transform from a monotonous, albeit privileged urbanite into a free-associating inhabitant of the urban periphery: the unimagined, non-privileged space of urban detritus. By engaging with these authors’ novels alongside the works of the Situationists, Walter Benjamin, Rob Nixon and others, the goal of this thesis is to explore how the dominant urban epistemologies are subverted—whether or not they should be subverted—while also analysing the representation of non-privileged communities and how they resist the dominant epistemology in an attempt to imagine the unimagined metropolis. Literature is uniquely suited to exploring this topic, with the act of comparing texts itself revealing the volatile nature of the urban environment.
Recommended Citation
Sherman, Colton R., "Imagining the Unimagined Metropolis: Privilege, Liminality, and Peripheral Communities in the Contemporary Urban Situation" (2017). Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository. 4811.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/etd/4811
Included in
Human Geography Commons, Modern Literature Commons, Other Architecture Commons, Social and Cultural Anthropology Commons, Urban Studies and Planning Commons