ABSTRACT

Although Brussels does not figure as prominently in literature in English as do the more iconic cosmopolitan cities of London and New York, when the flâneur-narrator of Open City (2011) keeps up his ambulatory habits in the Belgian capital during a brief holiday from his psychiatry residency at a Manhattan hospital, Teju Cole joins a long line of authors from across the world who have drawn inspiration from Brussels (Acke and Bekers, eds., Brussel schrijven/ Écrire Bruxelles). With his “hetero-images” (Leerssen, “Imagology”), the Nigerian American writer follows the example of other Anglophone authors, including William Makepeace Thackeray, Charlotte Brontë, and Joseph Conrad, who have captured Brussels from the perspective of the “Other.” Comparing Cole's Open City with Conrad's much older discussion of the impact of Europe's cross-Atlantic imperialism in Heart of Darkness (1899/1902), this article argues that the fictionalizations of Brussels in both texts serve the authors’ self-reflective socio-criticism, whether it is a modernist critique on colonization or a postmodernist and postcolonial reading of the present-day multicultural world, rather than contribute to the proliferation of any transcendent myth concerning Brussels.

摘要

尽管布鲁塞尔在英语文学中的地位不如伦敦和纽约等更具标志性的国际大都市，但《开放城市》（2011 年）的漫游叙述者在比利时首都的短暂假期中保持了他在比利时首都的走动习惯。 Teju Cole 是曼哈顿一家医院的精神病学住院医师，他加入了来自世界各地的众多从布鲁塞尔汲取灵感的作家队伍（Acke 和 Bekers，编辑，Brussel schrijven/Écrire Bruxelles）。这位尼日利亚裔美国作家以他的“异类形象”（Leerssen，“Imagology”）效仿了其他英语作家的榜样，包括威廉·梅克皮斯·萨克雷、夏洛特·勃朗特和约瑟夫·康拉德，他们从“他者”的角度占领了布鲁塞尔。 。” 比较科尔的开放城市康拉德在《黑暗的心》（1899/1902）中对欧洲跨大西洋帝国主义的影响进行了更古老的讨论，本文认为两篇文本中对布鲁塞尔的虚构化服务于作者的自我反思性社会批评，无论是现代主义对殖民化的批判或对当今多元文化世界的后现代主义和后殖民主义解读，而不是助长任何关于布鲁塞尔的超然神话的扩散。