The (dis)bewitched city

The great modernist literature is a fabulous archive of heterogeneous topographies of modernity, a collection of auctorial figures situated in a multiplicity of positions of the globalized modern world under the empire of capitalist expansion. Passing through Balzac and Zola's more or less politicized urban vernacular, through the complex cartography of class à la Melville, through Hamsun's hunger-ridden urban exploration, and reaching the retreating spaces of the great bourgeoisie in the metaphysical literature of the fin de Belle Époque, the non-synchronous synchronicity of a world in the process of radical transformation is clearly evident. 150 years after Thomas Mann's birth, even the sites of repose, these spaces of upper- and middle-class contemplative retreat, with all their infrastructure of caring for and structuring existential malaise, are no longer what they once were. In the era of late capitalism, the modernist logic of planning national urban spaces is disintegrating