Doris Lessing's London Observed and the Limits of Empathy
| dc.contributor.author | Györke Ágnes | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-10-24T05:29:44Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-10-24T05:29:44Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2017 | |
| dc.description.abstract | London Observed (1992) portrays London as a palimpsest which is profoundly different from the urban representations in Lessing’s early novels. As opposed to In Pursuit of the English (1960), The Golden Notebook (1962) and The Four-Gated City (1969), the volume depicts the metropolis as a joyful yet visibly controlled space, imagined by an unnamed narrator who is relentlessly wandering in the city. The London it presents hides secreted lives, yet it also requires the repression of empathetic affective responses to the lives of others. As I argue in this paper, the metropolis allows the narrator to enjoy urban life while remaining unaffected by its everyday traumas: she is not a hypersensitive urban observer in this city, but a disillusioned psychogeographer who opts for indifference in order to survive in the metropolis. Instead of offering alternative possibilities, as de Certeau believed in “Walking in the City,” walking produces a controlled and indifferent vision of the city in London Observed: it appears as an act that re-inscribes new narratives upon repressed stories. When read from today’s post-millennial vantage, we might discern how Lessing’s collection presciently suggests that the British capital, from the late 1980s onwards, was becoming not only a more visibly gendered and multicultural place, but also an indifferent and apathetic city, habitable at the price of declining empathy. | |
| dc.identifier.doi | 10.3917/ETAN.701.0063 | |
| dc.identifier.isbn | 9782252040683 | |
| dc.identifier.issn | 0014-195X | |
| dc.identifier.mtmt | 3233006 | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://krepozit.kre.hu/handle/123456789/174 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.relation.ispartof | Études anglaises 2017/1 (Vol. 70), p. 63-77. | |
| dc.title | Doris Lessing's London Observed and the Limits of Empathy | |
| dc.type | article |