HYBRID SPACES IN THE MODERN CITY: DUBLIN AND BUCHAREST IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Abstract

This article aims at looking at two centres of modernity, seen in space, time and metaphorical representation, in the early twentieth century as illustrated by the Irish writer James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) and the Romanian novelist Cezar Petrescu in Calea Victoriei [“Victory Avenue”], published in 1929. The analysis is based on recent research that has entangled the representation of space in cultural and fictional texts with the geographic spaces of the respective historical periods, the reason being that, since time and space are not to be severed, nor are history or geography. The theoretical approach to the analysis draws on views on space as a philosophical category and as a trope of modernity (Heidegger, Lefebvre, Foucault, de Certeau) from geocritical perspectives (Westphal, Tally) which focus on fictional representations of urban spaces that lead to the creation of cognitive maps cartographed by human activities. The two cities under scrutiny (Dublin and Bucharest) reveal striking similarities, never discussed before, in envisaging modernity as a site of conflict between a nostalgic, rustic, nineteenth-century and the dynamic process of constructing a local identity of place connected to history and politics. Moreover, one important point that connects the two cities despite the geographical distance between them is the rise of modernity as a paradigm shift from the spiritual to the commercial, from an artisan-minded space to an industrial one, generally, from the feudal system to a capital-based society, which actually means the shift, I argue, from agrarian domination to urbanization.