This report covers the main content, as I experienced it, of the conference on city literature organized by the Helsinki Literature and the City Network. The conference gathered various researchers working on city literature from both European countries and from outside Europe. It was launched by the three organizers. Two of them wished to highlight the two main aspects of the theme, the city peripheries or peripheral cities of the title, depending on from which viewpoint one wishes to approach the topic.
Jason Flinch, an Academy of Finland researcher of city peripheries, stressed how in areas where something stops, something else begins. He also discussed topographical and/or geographical areas such as slums that are zones that people empower and that they do not wish to show to outsiders. He also pointed out how the boundaries between the rural and urban are breaking down. One can live in the middle of nowhere, but surf online with the whole wide world at hand.
Markku Salmela approached the second conference theme by describing how some cities are more central than others. Non-Western and non-European cities were also covered in the form of papers presented at the conference even though the main focus was on big international cities such as New York and London. Salmela explained how Helsinki has a valuable vantage point for the second conference theme as it is a peripheral city in Finland; it is both central and non-central, hence the clever usage of the term relativity of peripherality.
Professor Tone Selboe was the other keynote speaker and she addressed Knut Hamsun’s Hunger in the first presentation given at the start of the first conference day. Professor Selboe depicted the setting of the novel and how the protagonist is surrounded by the city in the room that he rents. There are only thin walls protecting him from the surrounding city. The general feeling in the city is that of alienation. A recurring theme of the conference was that of being either inside or outside. This was highlighted in various presentations and perhaps it could even be said to be characteristic of peripheral city literature. Chicago functioned as the model for Kristiania, the city where the events in the novel take place, as Hamsun visited Chicago a year before he wrote the book. The features picked to depict the city reflected his background in Chicago.
The second city Selboe visited while presenting her paper was Stockholm in the form of August Strindberg’s Alone. Paris can be seen as the model for the Stockholm Strindberg created. Various papers presented during the conference focused on cities whose models have been bigger international cities. This was a common theme. The narrator in Alone is invaded by other people’s furniture as he rents two furnished rooms. The novel feeds on organic metaphors, such as the plumbing which connect him to the surroundings. The narrator navigates through a system that he cannot escape and his everyday life can be measured in movements. The notion of movement was another theme that was visited by various presenters. This can perhaps also be said to be common to city literature.
Two sessions took place simultaneously during the conference in between the two keynote speakers, Professor Selboe and Professor Tambling. Mostly it was easy to pick the most suitable session out of the five pairs as there were no major clashes in the programme. Western cities and especially London interested me the most. The cities visited during the sessions I listened to were, among others, New York, St. Petersburg, Paris, Helsinki, Tallinn and London. The most popular session turned out to be number eight, focusing on London literature, which took place on the morning of the second conference day.
I found this session to be most interesting as it dealt with the city where my research interest lies. Jason Finch from Åbo Akademi took the listeners to the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. He described his ongoing Academy of Finland research project where he scrutinizes 100 texts that depict London slums. These texts include novels, memoirs and authors such as George Gissing who published in the late 1800s and early 1900s when living in slums became prominent. The interest in the research lies in discovering changes instead of focusing on continuity. Yet again, the term outsider was heard when Finch stated how outsiders living in slums is one of the features of London slum literature. The idea is not to grasp the literary city as one but try to find different layers. London’s slum fiction evolved during the 1930s and 1940s when people started letting out rooms due to the ongoing Second World War. This particular aspect of the presentation I found intriguing as it touches upon my own area of research.
Finch was not the only speaker who chose to use a map to illustrate areas of London where the literary events are located and to explain topographical features. This method I found fascinating and worth testing out in future research. The second speaker of session eight, Lisbeth Larsson, also took the listeners on a tour around London in her presentation on Virginia Woolf’s Night and Day. Larsson depicted walks as a tool used by the main characters in the novel for finding themselves. In other words, walking had a performative character in the novel where the main characters live in the same area where they also walk. The routes of minor characters also have a role and impact the novel. I found Larsson’s use of Google Maps informative as one could see the routes the characters took on the maps.
Su Susan Jung also visited London in her presentation and she also took the listeners to Paris. Her paper focused on how gender, sensory experience, ethnicity and social class, to name some variables, change the landscape in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. She also focused on the olfactory code and the cultural history of smell.
Susanna Suomela took us, yet again, to London. Her paper focused on WWII literature. The net of character relations was crucial in the literature she presented in her paper. Catharina Drott also presented London, but from a different angle. She depicted the topographical change of London from a central place to a peripheral place during the Great Plague. Societal and behavioural changes were the foci in the novel and walking was again the means through which the city and the outcomes of the plague were perceived. This, again, might be said to be a typical feature of city literature.
Many papers were rather difficult to follow as the speakers kept their heads down and read straight off their papers without the help of any visuals. I believe that the messages would have been even more powerful had the speakers been presenting instead of reading. This goes for the majority of the presentations I listened to. It was difficult to take down notes, let alone stay on track when the papers were being read off so quickly. The presentations which formed an exception to this rule were the ones where the speakers used clear visuals with some quotes and key bullet points listed to illustrate their findings.
The conference made me think about the focus of my research on Andrea Levy’s four London novels. From now on my focus will be on the liminality of the places mentioned during the various centuries from the standpoint of either first-generation or second-generation Caribbean immigrants. Other reoccurring terms heard during the papers presented were utopia and dystopia which offer yet another perspective to study. Contrasting the centre and periphery and how there is movement from one place to another is another topic worth considering, especially from the viewpoint of identity. The conference covered a wide range of papers within city literature presented by various speakers from different walks of academia. It made me realize that presenting can either be peripheral or centred. It also boosted my confidence to one day present a paper at an international conference.
Ilona Rönkä
Plural Blog 