NEW YORK AS THE PALIMPSEST CITY: MEMORY AND OBLIVION IN URBAN CHRONOTOPE (BASED ON THE NOVEL “OPEN CITY” BY TEJU COLE)

Abstract

The study aims at identifying the relationship between urban space and memory culture. On the material of a novel “Open City” by Teju Cole, a modern American writer of Nigerian descent, the researcher analyzes how the narrator of this autofictional text interacts with the urban chronotope, what signs of the urban text he perceives and interprets and how this is associated with the global problem of memory and oblivion as part of a wider social discourse. The work focuses on the difference in commemorative strategies: whilst the narrator becomes a “moral witness” and intentionally finds connections between the past and the present (including by referring to “sites of memory” / “lieux de mémoire”), the characters around him, representing the entire American society in the novel, resort to the practice of “vital oblivion”, which makes it possible to displace traumatic memories and traumatic experience from short time memory and strive for the future, cutting off ties with the past.