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Change of Place, Space Perception and Topographic Discourse Cover

Change of Place, Space Perception and Topographic Discourse

By: Éva Toldi  
Open Access
|Dec 2015

Abstract

The paper examines the view and representation of space in Terézia Mora’s prose, primarily based on her novel entitled The Only Man on the Continent (Der einzige Mann auf dem Kontinent). In the universe of the novel the perception of space basically determines the individual’s space of action and highly influences his self-image as well as his attitude toward alterity. The city not only functions as space, but also forms a multicultural medium which becomes itself the subject of reflection and metanarration. In the novel the anthropological places and non-places, in Augé’s sense, change their function and thus the borders of referential, mental and virtual worlds are blurred, the notion of space itself is revaluated. The protagonist is the Ulysses of our days; his journeys and adventures mainly take place in his imagination. In the virtual world he loses his sense of reality, which can also be perceived in the narrative procedures of the text: the novel is in fact the protagonist’s quest for identity, his endless monologue, which is interrupted by the omniscient narrator’s comments from time to time. In the meantime the evident intertextual context also gets shape: the text maintains an ironical intertextual connection with James Joyce’s Ulysses.

Language: English, German
Page range: 95 - 112
Published on: Dec 30, 2015
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 3 issues per year

© 2015 Éva Toldi, published by Sapientia Hungarian University of Transylvania
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.