Modern Urbanism Reflecting in Existentialistic Literature

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Abstract

Emerging of the industrial revolution caused the dominance of machine in man`s life. At the beginning, man was fascinated by machine; by its order, automation, and its efficiency. Then he tried to adapt this mechanistic order to his life and create a completely ordered, clean and predictable environment. Thus modern urbanism appeared. In comparison with dark, airless and contaminated industrial environment, modernistic urbanism promised a hygienic, safe and just one. However, man gradually felt that this clean and neat environment is artificial, insincere, and even threatening. Man himself was transforming to a knot which had to act as a small part of a huge machine named modern city. Alliance was the first product of this environment, which looked doubtfully to man`s uniqueness and demanded him only similarity. Emerging of the industrial revolution caused the dominance of machine in man`s life. At the beginning, man was fascinated by machine; by its order, automation, and its efficiency. Then he tried to adapt this mechanistic order to his life and create a completely ordered, clean and predictable environment. Thus modern urbanism appeared. In comparison with dark, airless and contaminated industrial environment, modernistic urbanism promised a hygienic, safe and just one. However, man gradually felt that this clean and neat environment is artificial, insincere, and even threatening. Man himself was transforming to a knot which had to act as a small part of a huge machine named modern city. Alliance was the first product of this environment, which looked doubtfully to man`s uniqueness and demanded him only similarity. Frantz Kafka in his deliberately unfinished novel, The Castle, questions the need to K as an expert. K can stay in town only if he ignores his unique abilities as a surveyor and become similar to others. The description of the town with its endless roads and boring houses can be compared with modernistic suburbs. Kafka also in his dialogue with his friend Gustave Yanush , in spite of an unpleasant description of Josefov, his childhood place in Prague; does not agree with what was replaced with it after reconstruction. He believes that old place had something real and genuine that new hygienic one does not have. Sadegh Hedayat, the famous conyemporary Iranian writer also describes a city which undoubtedly is not Tehran in 1950 decade. He, who educated and then lived in Paris for many years, has tried to show his conception of physical appearance of a changing industrial city and his negative feelings about it. Jean Paul Sartre in Nausea writes about his fictitious city Bouveill and its residents. By likening Bouveill residents to objects he tries to describe the mechanistic order of modernistic urbanism and the life of a completely predictable environment. Thus man, as the resident of modern city, struggling with alliance, boredom and loneliness; in a protesting reflection started to admire non-equilibrium, discord and ugliness. Ugliness gradually lost its meaning and thus, the aesthetic of ugliness emerged.This article seeks the effects and results of modernistic urbanism; first in contemporary literature and second in its urbanism, and tracing the solution in the late twentieth century`s styles.

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