Actors and Networks in the Megacity

A Literary Analysis of Urban Narratives

Prachi More

• Publisher: transcript Verlag
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9783837638349
• eBook ISBN: 9783839438343
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Museum Studies
• Index: Literature

This study is a concise introduction to Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory and its application in a literary analysis of urban narratives of the 21st century. We encounter well-known psycho-geographers such as Iain Sinclair and Sam Miller, and renowned authors, Patrick Neate and Suketu Mehta. Prachi More analyses these authors' accounts of vastly different cities such as London, Delhi, Mumbai, Johannesburg, New York and Tokyo. Are these urban narratives a contemporary solution to documenting an ever-evasive urban reality? If so, how do they embody "matters of concern" as Latour would have put it, laying bare modern-day "actors" and "networks" rather than reporting mere "matters of fact"? These questions are drawn into an inter-disciplinary discussion that addresses concerns and questions of epistemology, the sociology of knowledge as well as urban and documentary studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table Of Contents
• List Of Illustrations
• Acknowledgement
• Introduction: Urban Narratives And Bruno Latour’s Empiricism
• I. Contextualizing Contemporary Urban Narratives As Literary Documentary
• II. Bruno Latour’s ‘New Empiricism’
• III. The Poetics and Politics of Rambling in lain Sinclair’s Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire
• IV. Strategies, Spatial Trajectories And Scenography: Micro-Mapping The Megacity In Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City
• V. Of Spirals And Capitals: Sam Miller’s Delhi, Adventures In A Megacity
• Conclusion: Actor-Network Theory And Literary Criticism
• Works Cited