Reading the City: Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy

The goal of this paper is to explore the concept of “city” as seen by the American novelist Paul Auster, in his postmodernist meta-fiction, The New York Trilogy. The starting point of this paper is R. Barthes’ idea of seeing the city as an inscription of man in space. In his Semiology and the urban, Barthes argues that the city is a discourse, and the process of reading it is highly individual: “the city speaks to its inhabitants, we speak our city”. He who moves about the city is a kind of reader, and it is in these wanderings that one reads the urban landscape. Marxist critic, Walter Benjamin coined the term flaneur, the only capable of defining the urban space, as the intersections between memory, experience and history. In other words, urban life offers the possibility of discovering the self because it emphasizes the modalities through which individuality becomes an event of the conscience and of history. Using Barthes’ and Benjamin’s theories, we will try to read Auster’s city.city, discourse, flaneur, urban landscape, individuality