From Tumultuous to Familiar Literary Geographies : Approach and Outline

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Table of contents

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
DECLARATION
ABSTRACT
ABBREVIATIONS
INTRODUCTION
1990s-2010s: The Global Metamorphosis of Indian Cities
1990s-2010s: Contemporary Shifts in the Indian Literary Landscape
I. From the Spatial Turn to Postcolonial and World-Literature Theory,
a Theoretical Itinerary
1. The City in Spatial Literary Studies
2. Indian Cities in Postcolonial and Urban Studies
3. Indian Cities in the Literary World-System
II. Presentation of the Corpus
III. The Two Entangled Modes of Indian Anglophone Urban Writing
1. The Epic Mode
2. The Ordinary Mode
IV. From Tumultuous to Familiar Literary Geographies: Approach and Outline
CHAPTER 1. WRITING THE CRISIS OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT
I. The Cataclysmic (Re)Birth of Indian Cities
1. In the Eye of the Storm: The Eruption of the City
2. Cities Under Construction, Landscapes of Devastation
3. All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Masquerade of Urban Renewal
II. Writing Spatial Amnesia
1. Urban Space as Spectacle
2. Cities Built on Plunder
3. Countering The ‘Project of Unseeing’
CHAPTER 2. CITIES OF CONFLICT
I. Quests Through the Urban Jungle
1. The City as Antagonist
2. Slumming it?
II. Spectacular Shocks, Outbursts of Violence
1. Psychic Deformations
a. ‘Failed and Dissolute Knights’
b. American Psycho in Delhi
2. The Spectacle of Violence?
a. Between Ethnography and Sensationalism
b. Politicizing Violence
III. ‘Cities of Fortified Fragments’, or Planned Violence
1. Shopping Fortresses
2. Millennial Garden Cities
CHAPTER 3. IN BETWEEN LOCAL AND GLOBAL SCALES, THE POLITICS OF THE URBAN EPIC
I. Rewriting the Genius Loci? The Exceptionality of Indian Cities
1. Mumbai’s Restlessness
2. Delhi, a City Doomed to be Destroyed
3. Excess as Strategic Exoticism?
II. Widening the Scope: Global Stories of Shock
1. Back to the Future? Critical Urban Dystopias
2. ‘Everlasting Uncertainty and Agitation’: Delirious Capitalist Cities
3. World Texts, Global Writers?
CHAPTER 4. DOWNSIZING THE INDIAN GLOBAL CITY: STREET-CORNER NARRATIVES
I. The City Through the Lens of the Locality
1. The Imagined Geographies of Kolkata’s Paras
2. Delhi’s Nukkad Novels
II. Street-Corner Ethnographies
1. The Participant Observation of the Locality
2. The Locality as a Domesticated Public Space
III. The City as a Common Space
1. The Collective Imagination of the Locality
2. The Common Language of the Street
CHAPTER 5. ORDINARY RHYTHMS: WRITING EVERYDAY LIFE IN THE CITY
I. ‘The Enduring Allure of the Everyday’
1. Through the Magnifying Glass: Defamiliarizing the Everyday
2. The Uncertainty of the Everyday
II. Circling around the Event
1. Dilating the Temporality of the Event
2. Muffling the Sounds of History
3. Miniaturising History
III. Writing Everyday Violence on a Minor Mode
1. Small Tragedies, Minor Events?
2. The ‘School of Cool’, or the Romanticising of Violence
CHAPTER 6. ‘A FOOTHOLD IN THE CITY’, THE POLITICS OF THE URBAN ORDINARY
I. Anti-Heroes: Debunking India’s Success Stories
1. Promises vs. Compromises
2. Failures and Wild Goose Chasers
II. ‘Real Utopias’: Reclaiming Urban Space
1. From Occupying to Seceding?
2. ‘A Foothold in the City’, Urban Micro-Politics
III. Grounded Texts, Rooted Writers?
1. The Writer as Archaeologist
2. ‘Localizing Dissent’
CONCLUSION
1. Map of Delhi
2. Map of Mumbai
3. Map of Kolkata
WORKS CITED
I. Primary Sources
1. Corpus
a. Selective Corpus
b.E xtended Corpus
2. Texts and Interviews of the Writers of the Corpus
a. Novels, Essays and Articles
b. Interviews Conducted by the Author
c. Interviews
3. Other Primary Sources
a. Literature
b. Cinema
4. Information Sources
II. Critical and Theoretical Sources
1. Literary Criticism
a. Literary Criticism on Indian Writing
b. General Literary Criticism and theory
2. Other critical and theoretical sources
a. Studies on India and Indian cities
b. Writings on the City
c. Social Sciences and Theory
INDEX OF NAMES
SUMMARY IN FRENCH / RÉSUMÉ EN FRANÇAIS