READING AND WRITING THE CITY IN MODERNIST FICTION
READING AND WRITING THE CITY IN MODERNIST FICTION

Summary/Abstract: This article starts from the premise that in order to make sense of the protean, complex and challenging reality of the city, modernist writers like Joyce and Woolf first purported to read it, and then to write about it. In doing so, they looked at its signs, and also at its gaps and silences. Woolf was interested in thinking spaciously, fusing masculinity and femininity in the perfectly balanced androgynous mind. The city provides her with the respite from its hustle and bustle, and also with the elements (signs and signals) which she arranges in a pattern whose geometry fuses them. Sometimes she shows us minds revelling in the city traffic, while some other times she captures the shock the mind receives when associated stimuli strike it. Joyce has Stephen Dedalus standing on the steps of the library and pondering on birds flying like words flowing on a page, or later in Ulysses he explores the ”ineluctable modality of the visible” and ”the ineluctable modality of the audible”, looking for the signs he needs.

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