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Title "Hyper-mediated City Spaces: A Study of Phantasmagoria and Mythic Consciousness in Selected South Asian Fiction"

Author(s) Asma Niaz

Abstract The research studies the hyper-mediated South Asian Cities and their representations in literature. It aims to analyze Rohinton’s Mistry A Fine Balance and Kamila Shamsie’s Kartography by invoking the theoretical positions of Nadir Lahiji, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Cassirer, and John Eric Bellquist. They have enunciated their concepts like ‘hypermediated city,’ ‘phantasmagoria,’ and ‘mythic consciousness’ respectively in the works “Phantasmagoria and the Architecture of the Contemporary City,” “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Vol. 2), and “Mythic Consciousness: Cassirer’s Theories and Strindberg Practices.” I use these concepts to study the South Asian cityscapes. The central argument of this study is that South Asian cities exhibit features of hyper-mediation. I postulate that phantasmagoria and mythic consciousness of people in the contemporary cityscape have been significantly altered due to the omnipresence of media in the city spaces. The way people, living in cities, conceive, perceive, imagine, and experience cities is mediated by media and is, therefore, different from previous historical makeup. It is a qualitative research and Catherine Belsey’s textual analysis is used as a research method. This research examines the selected novels for their representations of Bombay (Mumbai) and Karachi because they have been largely ignored in the available urban studies, especially in the Western critical scholarship. The study, therefore, is likely to contribute in the production of knowledge in the domain of South Asian Urban Literary Studies.

Type Thesis/Dissertation

Faculty Languages

Department English

Language English

Publication Date 2024-08-21

Subject Literature

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