Naslov
The City and the Highway: the Spatialization of the Double at the Fin de Siècle(s)

Autori
Matek, Ljubica

Vrsta, podvrsta i kategorija rada
Sažeci sa skupova, sažetak, znanstveni

Izvornik
Literature, Culture and the Fantastic: Challenges of the Fin de Siècle(s). / Irena Grubica - Rijeka : Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Rijeci, 2012, 60-61

ISBN
978-953-6104-86-4

Skup
Literature, Culture and the Fantastic: Challenges of the Fin de Siècle(s). An International Interdisciplinary Conference.

Mjesto i datum
Rijeka, Hrvatska, 17.02.2012. - 18.02.2012

Vrsta sudjelovanja
Predavanje

Vrsta recenzije
Međunarodna recenzija

Ključne riječi
city; highway; double; London; Los Angeles; R.L. Stevenson; David Lynch

Sažetak
The paper proposes to show how the city, which in most works of the fin de siècle fantastic literature was presented as a metaphorical locus of human dual identity, is subtly being exchanged by the highway in postmodern fantastic works of the end of the twentieth century. To exemplify the close connection between space and human identity, the paper explores two end-of-the-century works of art: Stevenson’s novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), and David Lynch’s film The Lost Highway (1997), each of which presents a different kind of space as the basis for exploration and understanding of the instability of human identity. The paper aims to show how the concept of double identity situated in and provoked by the appearance of a metropolis, mutated into a more fluid conceptualization of self as ultimately ambiguous and unknowable, which is represented by the transient space of a highway. As Augè proposes, the erasure of frontiers caused by globalization also erases the boundaries between the individual and his or her environment, through the multiplication of the spaces of circulation, consumption and communication, that is highways of different kinds, or, more specifically, non-places. While London served as the city of darkness and crime at the end of the nineteenth century, Los Angeles, as an automobile-oriented, fragmented city, and the typical setting of film noir, became the “terrain of apprehension and despair” (Silver and Ursini) in the twentieth century. Lynch’s film proposes a worldview typical of the end of the twentieth century ; namely, that there are no fixed interpretations or clear-cut meanings. While Stevenson proposed the idea that there are two sides to every person and expressed the dangers arising from the possibility that scientific methods be used to unleash the “lower” side, in Lynch identity is no longer identifiable or graspable at all, but open to various contested perspectives, none of which can ever prevail. The fluidity or instability of the subject is different than the one expressed in Stevenson, because it is ever-changing and incomprehensible. At the end of the twentieth century, marked by constant mobility on the physical or virtual highway, the assumption of an identity, fluid yet explainable in terms proposed by the fin de siècle science and worldview, no longer exists.

Izvorni jezik
Engleski

Znanstvena područja
Filologija

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