Metropolis and Experience: Defoe, Dickens, Joyce
Author: Hye-Joon Yoon
Date Of Publication: Jan 2012
Isbn13: 978-1-4438-3455-1
Isbn: 1-4438-3455-6
Metropolis and Experience: Defoe, Dickens, Joyce offers a close reading of the major texts of Defoe, Dickens, and Joyce, in their respective historical contexts and in comparison with their intertextual companions, from seventeenth-century “character” pamphlets through Baudelaire to Calvino. In doing so, it challenges the quietist complacency of specialization prevalent in current academia to contribute to a critique of urban modernity in the tradition of Simmel, Benjamin, and Lefebvre. Taking its cue from Benjamin’s bisection of “experience” into subjective sensory Erlebnis and communal reflective Erfahrung, Metropolis and Experience uses this binary pair as a categorical guide in its analysis of the stylistic and thematic adventures of the three centerpiece authors. Whereas Defoe’s novels embody a Simmelian metropolitan mentality through its narration of lived experience in paratactic prose, Dickens strives to humanize the sprawling Victorian metropolis into an experience for communal sharing. In Joyce’s works, the colonial dejections and belatedness of the Hibernian metropolis are transformed into an exuberant excess where both Erlebnis and Erfahrung meet their joyous end. This investigation of the interconnections between the metropolis, experience, and the novel takes place in tandem with a sustained query on non-literary subtopics such as finance capitalism and urban class antagonism. This is literary criticism charged with relevance for the age of “Occupy Wall Street.”

Hye-Joon Yoon teaches English and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University, Seoul, Korea. His publications in English include Physiognomy of Capital in Charles Dickens as well as articles on major authors from Milton to Woolf. He has published two novels and a sonnet sequence in Korean. His next book will deal with the rhetoric of 18th century economic discourse.

“In Metropolis and Experience, Prof. Hye-Joon Yoon has brilliantly traced a history of city life as viewed from street level in the literary accounts of authors as diverse as St Augustine and Italo Calvino. The authors taking center stage—Defoe, Dickens, and Joyce—are products of the modern metropolis of international credit, capitalist expansion, and colonial subjection. Here where the effort to secure a private life means losing oneself in the crowd, we follow the career of the flanner though detailed accounts of all the major works of the centerpiece authors in pursuit of “meaningful human relationship” than can only “unfold in the margins and interstices.” The character of such lived experience can best be apprehended in a manner of prose Prof Yoon identifies as “conjunctive disjunction,” while the demands of expressing the meaning of that experience encounters the obstacles of journalistic and scientific idioms, a confrontation which in the end exposes the inadequacies of the latter. Metropolis and Experience brings together the daunting qualifications of what experience means with a rigor that makes it absolutely convincing that experience (which is revealed to be itself a dialectic) should be the concept to mediate the linguistic field of the novel and the economic field of the historical metropolis.”

—Peter J. Grieco, PhD, poet and independent scholar

“Hye-Joon Yoon’s Metropolis and Experience: Defoe, Dickens, Joyce admits to being a little out-of-step with current trends in literary criticism, especially in its ambition to do justice to three very different authors (Defoe, Dickens, and Joyce) across three different centuries. It takes a lot of training, deep thought, and a fair amount of chutzpah to perform complex readings of each of these three, not to mention placing them in dialogue about the nature of city life and how to give it adequate representation in narrative form. The book succeeds because its author adopts a detached perspective, as someone who knows London and Dublin very well but isn’t an invested resident of either; by the same token, he isn’t a special advocate for any of his three novelists, or for the strategies they deploy, and is thus sympathetically attuned to what each tried to do and why. It’s not, then, a case of using the Victorian Dickens to highlight a more radical Joyce, or the earlier authors to draw out the blindspots of modernism. Each author gets to plead his case, articulated through intensive close reading and contextualization.

The key term in the book is ‘experience,’ and here too, there’s a pay-off to focusing its analysis around such a seemingly dated old-humanist term. Really, it’s about ‘lived experience’ in Benjamin’s sense: how the form of the novel might give articulate form to something that’s still (just about) collective, and yet increasingly felt as individualized and contingent. Cities have always been the place where the problem is most deeply present, of course: an urban experience that’s excessive, fleeting, hard to pin down, and even harder to communicate to others—even as we know that great numbers of fellow human beings are going through exactly the same thing. Approaching the concept of experience via German philosophy and critical theory, Hye-Joon maps out a trajectory of responses from Defoe (whose tendency is to embrace the dizzying contingencies of city life) through Dickens (who looks for larger patterns of general meaning, but is also a journalist at heart), and up to Joyce (whose work thematizes precisely the problems of fragmentation and totality). Metropolis and Experience is stimulating and bracing as a work of literary scholarship, and timely in its revisiting of a range of urban aesthetics at a moment when global economic crisis once again threatens to reconfigure what it means to live in cities.”

—Simon Joyce, Professor of English, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia, USA

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Price Us Usd: 67.99

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