... and poetic conjuring of local esoterica within an original soundscape by Alan Moore and ... p... more ... and poetic conjuring of local esoterica within an original soundscape by Alan Moore and ... phe, such as George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) or Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City ... and alliances masked by multiple and purposefully multivalent levels of secrecy and deception ...
A new school of London literature has emerged in the 1990s as a response to the neo-modernist reg... more A new school of London literature has emerged in the 1990s as a response to the neo-modernist regeneration of London's East End in the 1980s by the Thatcherite Conservative government. Using the spatial and literary density of London as their subject, these new urban writings juxtapose the present with the past, presenting a cityscape of heavy fragmentation, elusiveness as well as dynamics. Of these, Iain Sinclair's work stands out as "our greatest guide to London," and "the most distinctive voice among an array of lyricists-cum-satirists of fin-de-siècle British life." Sinclair has made a vocation of excavating the hidden, the lost or erased spatial configurations of London's cultural marginalia, in order to construct an oppositional space on the material and everyday level against the official historical and spatial discourse of Thatcherite corporatism. Sinclair practices a method of psychogeography, where the city and subject collapse into one, and the city becomes a psychological entity and a shifting character. Walking the streets of London has in particular become a recurring theme and metaphor. This paper examines two of his most famous works, his breakthrough novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Lights Out for the Territory (1997), a non-fictional prose work on London. It focuses first on the spatiality of London's East End, which is the primary territory of Sinclair's psychogeography, and then on his mode of spatial investigation, that of the walker/stalker. The paper then seeks to point out the limitations inherent in such a mode, its assumption of privileged knowledge and voyeuristic power, and its inevitable selectivity due to an exclusive interest only in the erased past and a denial of any redemptive quality in the present. The dark energies thus unearthed, despite their resistance to the dominant spatial discourse, are no less a form of canonization, albeit an alternative one.
... set of men the world ever saw' (1884: 13) and labour leaders, such as Keir Har... more ... set of men the world ever saw' (1884: 13) and labour leaders, such as Keir Hardie for ... tide of socialist opinion that cast his resistance to industrial civilization as arcane and conservative. ... a sense our uncontamination by, the ideas at the basis of a still-real European civilisation ...
... and poetic conjuring of local esoterica within an original soundscape by Alan Moore and ... p... more ... and poetic conjuring of local esoterica within an original soundscape by Alan Moore and ... phe, such as George Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) or Umberto Lenzi's Nightmare City ... and alliances masked by multiple and purposefully multivalent levels of secrecy and deception ...
A new school of London literature has emerged in the 1990s as a response to the neo-modernist reg... more A new school of London literature has emerged in the 1990s as a response to the neo-modernist regeneration of London's East End in the 1980s by the Thatcherite Conservative government. Using the spatial and literary density of London as their subject, these new urban writings juxtapose the present with the past, presenting a cityscape of heavy fragmentation, elusiveness as well as dynamics. Of these, Iain Sinclair's work stands out as "our greatest guide to London," and "the most distinctive voice among an array of lyricists-cum-satirists of fin-de-siècle British life." Sinclair has made a vocation of excavating the hidden, the lost or erased spatial configurations of London's cultural marginalia, in order to construct an oppositional space on the material and everyday level against the official historical and spatial discourse of Thatcherite corporatism. Sinclair practices a method of psychogeography, where the city and subject collapse into one, and the city becomes a psychological entity and a shifting character. Walking the streets of London has in particular become a recurring theme and metaphor. This paper examines two of his most famous works, his breakthrough novel White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987) and Lights Out for the Territory (1997), a non-fictional prose work on London. It focuses first on the spatiality of London's East End, which is the primary territory of Sinclair's psychogeography, and then on his mode of spatial investigation, that of the walker/stalker. The paper then seeks to point out the limitations inherent in such a mode, its assumption of privileged knowledge and voyeuristic power, and its inevitable selectivity due to an exclusive interest only in the erased past and a denial of any redemptive quality in the present. The dark energies thus unearthed, despite their resistance to the dominant spatial discourse, are no less a form of canonization, albeit an alternative one.
... set of men the world ever saw' (1884: 13) and labour leaders, such as Keir Har... more ... set of men the world ever saw' (1884: 13) and labour leaders, such as Keir Hardie for ... tide of socialist opinion that cast his resistance to industrial civilization as arcane and conservative. ... a sense our uncontamination by, the ideas at the basis of a still-real European civilisation ...
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