ABSTRACT

In Teju Cole’s novels Every Day Is for the Thief (2007, 2014) and Open City (2011), big city life is explored from the perspective of narrators who are outsiders to the cities they describe. They thus give rather distanced, journalistic reports about their experiences. Both novels convey their meaning via spatio-temporal conceptions that I analyze with the help of urban theories by Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. The narrator of Open City learns to uncover spatial memory by walking the streets of New York City – spatial memory lays bare the painful source of his emotional detachment and ultimately forces him to acknowledge a crime he committed in the past. The narrator of Every Day Is for the Thief at first seems to engage in a more conventional recovery of submerged childhood memory but then also explores the specific relationship between space and memory.

摘要

在 Teju Cole 的小说Every Day Is for the Thief (2007, 2014) 和Open City (2011) 中，大城市生活是从他们所描述的城市的局外人的叙述者的角度探索的。因此，他们对他们的经历进行了相当遥远的新闻报道。这两部小说都通过时空概念传达了它们的含义，我借助米歇尔·德·塞托 (Michel de Certeau) 和亨利·勒斐伏尔 (Henri Lefebvre) 的城市理论对其进行了分析。开放城市的叙述者通过走在纽约市的街道上学会了揭示空间记忆——空间记忆暴露了他情感超脱的痛苦根源，并最终迫使他承认他过去犯下的罪行。每天都是小偷的叙述者 起初似乎对淹没的童年记忆进行了更传统的恢复，但随后也探索了空间与记忆之间的特定关系。