Topic
The City of Vanities and the Global City: Urban Solitude from Wolfe to DeLillo
This paper traces three decades of alienating urban experience across three New York novels — Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991), and Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis (2003) — arguing that the city of vanities Wolfe renders as a tribal, still-legible social collision becomes, by DeLillo’s novel, something categorically different: not a more alienating city but a node in Saskia Sassen’s global city, whose social logic has been structurally decoupled from local urban experience. The paper reads this trajectory through three primary methodological sources. David Riesman’s lonely crowd, and its compounding into Christopher Lasch’s culture of narcissism aand John Kenneth Galbraith’s account of manufactured want, supply the psychological and economic background for the progressive hollowing of each novel’s protagonist. Robert Putnam’s empirical sociology of social capital’s collapse underlies the reasoning of each text’s fictional and psychological loss. And Saskia Sassen’s The Global City supplies the paper’s decisive final argument: Eric Packer’s solitude is not a further intensification of the urban alienation Wolfe and Ellis render but a category change — his structurally relevant social field is the synchronized New York–London–Tokyo network, and Sassen’s account of the global city’s local economy explains why the street outside Eric Parker’s limousine has become psychologically irrelevant. Packer’s loneliness is the most contemporary form these novels depict because it has ceased, in any structurally meaningful sense, to be urban loneliness, it has dissolved beyond urbanity.
Iryna Antonenko (University of Gdansk)
Iryna Antonenko is an academic teacher of English, holding position of an Assistant in University of Gdansk. Her research focuses on the literary representation of the New York metropolis. Her work investigates the narrative techniques used to construct the city and its people on the page, exploring how New York City frequently transcends its setting to function as a core protagonist in American literature. Driven by an interdisciplinary approach, her research bridges the fields of urban narratives, urban sociology, and sociolinguistics. She is particularly interested in examining the recurring motifs of the "lonely crowd" and the city of lonely people, analyzing how individual isolation manifests within urban spaces. She joins the "Urbanity and Beyond" conference to share insights on contemporary theoretical and methodological trends in urban sociology to decode the complex relationship between cityscapes and literary representations of the metropolis.