Joyce, Benjamin, and the Modern Metropolis

The central thesis that I intend to address in this paper is that the rise of the modern, industrial city produced a plethora of particular, urban phenomena that have been recorded and interpreted in various ways, and in various literary and theoretical texts, and that these treatments can be arranged, compared, and contrasted to reveal a critical interpretation of the modern, urban condition. Although the growth of metropolises gave rise to a myriad of responses during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this study focuses on particular twentieth century responses to the city, namely, the writings of Walter Benjamin and James Joyce.