Bridge as Territory: A Speculation on Bridge and Its Urban Meaning through Henry Miller’s Black Spring

Seunghan Paek (백승한)

Bridge as Territory: A Speculation on Bridge and Its Urban Meaning through Henry Miller’s Black Spring

인문논총
2016, 39(), pp.27-44
Publisher : Institute for Human studies, Kyungnam University
Research Area : Humanities > Other Humanities
Published : February 28, 2016

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on examining how the American novelist Henry Miller takes ‘bridge’ as a threshold from which to explore the multiplicity of the metropolis New York through his 1936 work Black Spring. Instead of treating bridge as a passage or backdrop for his narrative construction, Miller activates it as a territory where his past memories and present experiences, as well as disparate and fleeting impressions and imaginations, meet altogether, which release a plethora of urban affects in aleatory and haptic ways. In this respect the Brooklyn Bridge is the very place that repeatedly appears in Black Spring, which plays as a critical point of departure enabling Miller to set up a world in which he weaves together instances of everyday life without subsuming one over another. Although subtle and implicit, Miller brings forth a way of taking the capitalist city space as an affective terrain in a Deleuzian sense, which encourages us to be attentive to the vibrancy and dynamism immanent in the modern metropolis despite its alienating nature.

KEYWORDS

bridge, territory, urban meaning, Henry Miller, Black Spring

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

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