Academic literature on the topic 'Perdido Street Station'

This paper explores allegorical and unnatural elements in China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station, starting with a parallel between the fictional city New Crobuzon and London. Fantasy literature examines human nature by means of myth and archetype and science fiction exploits the same aspects, although emphasizing technological possibilities. Horror is said to explore human nature plunging into our deepest fears. We encounter the three elements profusely in the narrative, making it a dense fictional exercise. In postclassical narratology, unnatural narratives are understood as mimetical exercises questioning verisimilitude in the level of the story and of discourse. When considered unnatural, narratives have a broader scope, sometimes even transcending this mimetical limitation. Fantastical and marvelous elements generally strike us as bizarre and question the standards that govern the real world around us. Although Fantasy worlds do also mirror the world we live in, they allow us the opportunity to confront the model when physically or logically impossible characters or scenes enhance the reader’s imagination. Elements of the fantastic and the marvelous relate to metaphor as a figure of speech and can help us explore characters’ archetypical functions, relating these allegorical symbols to the polis. In Miéville’s narrative, such characters will be paralleled to inhabitants of London in different temporal and spatial contexts, enhancing how the novel metaphorically represents the city as an elaborate narrative strategy.

Abstract This article investigates the forms and functions of description in New Weird fiction, using texts by China Miéville as examples. It contrasts the expansive descriptive routines of his novel Perdido Street Station (2000) with the compact forms of descriptivity found in the short story “The Condition of New Death,” focussing on the role of metaphoric condensation and the blending of description with narrative and explanatory modes. Occasionally drawing on other stories contained in Miéville’s 2015 collection Three Moments of an Explosion, it formulates a model of the descriptive economy of short fiction.

O objetivo desta dissertação é a interpretação do romance Perdido Street Station (2000), de China Miéville, sob a perspectiva da teoria literária e da crítica materialista. Considerada inovadora por retratar contradições sociais, políticas e econômicas da realidade pela via do fantástico e, ao mesmo tempo, mesclar convenções e temas derivados de Ficção Científica, Fantasia e Horror, a obra tornou-se a referência principal para o surgimento de um novo subgênero literário, o New Weird. Com o intuito de aprofundar essa definição e compreender os mecanismos e estruturas formais presentes no romance, abordamos em detalhe as discussões de autores e críticos a respeito do New Weird. A partir desse levantamento, foi possível identificar as estratégias de articulação entre os gêneros da literatura fantástica presentes no romance e verificar que ele também apresenta proximidade em relação às estruturas do Romance de Formação Bildungsroman e do romance de Distopia Crítica. Argumentamos que é principalmente por meio dos recursos desses dois gêneros que se desenvolve no romance o conteúdo de crítica social e reflexão acerca da realidade material, discutindo temas como alienação, fragmentação e mecanização do indivíduo sob a vigência do modo de produção capitalista; fetichismo da mercadoria e consumismo; políticas de identidade raciais e étnicas; assim como cultura e hibridismo na pós-modernidade. Concluímos que o romance efetivamente inova na maneira com que articula os gêneros e propicia a reflexão a respeito da realidade contemporânea, utilizando as diversas categorias de estranhamento propiciadas pela literatura fantástica.
The purpose of the present dissertation is to make a reading of China Miévilles novel Perdido Street Station (2000), from the perspective of literary theory and materialist criticism. Considered a pioneer in the way it uses the fantastic to portray the social, political and economic contradictions of reality and at the same time mixing conventions and themes derived from Science Fiction, Fantasy and Horror, the novel turned out to be the main reference for the emergence of a new literary subgenre, the New Weird. In order to make a profound study of this definition and understand the formal devices and structures present in the novel, we approached in detail the discussions of authors and critics regarding the New Weird. Based on that it was possible to identify the strategies for the articulation of the genres of fantastic literature present in the novel and to verify that it has close affiliation with the structure of the Formation Novel - Bildungsroman - and also to the Critical Dystopia novel. We argued that it is mainly based on the resources provided by these two genres that the novel develops the content of social criticism and meditation on material reality, discussing subjects such as alienation, fragmentation and mechanization of the individual under the scope of the capitalist mode of production; commodity fetishism and consumerism; racial and ethnic identity politics; as well as culture and hybridism in postmodernity. We concluded that the novel effectively innovates both in the way it articulates the genres and how it enables meditations on contemporary reality, making use of the different categories of estrangement provided by the fantastic literature.

China Miéville’s second novel Perdido Street Station (2000) addresses the idea of essence from three different perspectives which mirror a number of concepts of speculative realism. The essence being insisted on here is what is most hidden, strange and fluid; as Harman says, ‘“essence” simply means that any object has real properties that are not exhausted by their current appearance in the mind or their current impact on other entities more generally’ . The main issue that the character Lin has in capturing Mr Motley in a sculpture of him she is making is that she cannot think how to represent essence while seeing his parts in motion. This is because she is a figure of +what Harman calls fission and fusion, meaning the separation and joining of an object and qualities.

The New Weird engages audiences in ways that are dark, terrifying, speculative and fantastic. Despite its essential hybridity – drawing from Gothic horror, science fiction and urban fantasy – the New Weird is largely Gothic in style, particularly through its bleak and terrifying atmospheres, its violence, its extravagance and its suspicion of predominant social and cultural institutions. Further, the New Weird pushes the boundaries of sanity by suggesting that common-sense notions of reality are unstable, that human beings are not the centre of everything and that human cosmology is fatally flawed. To address these themes, my discussion largely turns to a handful of representative texts, including City of Saints and Madmen(2001), by Jeff VanderMeer;Threshold(2001), by Caitlín Kiernan;Perdido Street Station (2000), by China Miéville; and The Etched City(2003), by K. J. Bishop.