University of Pennsylvania THINKING URBAN SPACE February 15, 2008 Home Call for Papers Conference Program Paper Abstracts Directions and Information about Traveling to Philadelphia The University of Pennsylvania and Philadelphia	Corey Twitchell | The Disintegration of the Individual and Evacuation of Urban Spaces in Kracht’s 1979       In his novel 1979, Christian Kracht constructs a world that mimics the closed circuit television camera that two of the characters engineer on the eve of the Iranian revolution in 1979.  What begins as a travel narrative in the spirit of The Road to Oxiana quickly dissolves, as the nameless (and identity-less) narrator enters increasingly hostile and alienating terrain while simultaneously facing personal and physical loss.        By placing the novel into conversation with the film The Women (which Kracht has cited as a reference point while writing 1979), I will trace the implementation of an exacting aesthetic, as it is taken to its most logical and horrifying conclusion, as a way of constructing a landscape in which (postmodern) capitalist culture and the reliance on identity politics are starkly critiqued.  Identity politics, as they are located at the site of one’s own body, are shown to be an empty category as the narrator moves into terrain where his body becomes exposed to harsh natural elements and then finally to the torture of a Chinese labor camp.         Mavrocordato’s uncanny prescience seems to come true: by the end of the novel, the narrator has been “halved” in several ways along the course of his journey, most vividly in that he loses half of his body weight in the concentration camp.  While the narrator, within the paradigm of this aesthetic, comments on how he has finally been able to “seriously abnehmen,” the reader is left with the unsettling image of an individual body on its way to imminent destruction.  By the end of the novel, Tehran and other urban areas mentioned throughout fade into the narrator’s past, as his individual body (and self) is left to disintegrate in the bleak wasteland of the Chinese work camp—an obvious reference to the Nazi Konzentrationslager.                The aesthetic Kracht evokes functions as a strategy for moving the narrator from urban spaces to a desolate landscape à la Paul Virilio’s City of Panic.  This rigid aesthetic can be identified and indeed problematized as a “queer” aesthetic.  In my paper, I will demonstrate that, just as The Women constructs a narrative space completely void of male characters in order to emphasize the female, the narrative of 1979 constructs spaces—urban cityscapes and apocalyptic landscapes—that are inhabited and administered entirely by queer characters.  According to my analysis, Kracht’s use of this aesthetic (as troubling as it is), within the historical framework of the Iranian and Chinese Revolutions, acts as a vehicle for illustrating and subsequently deconstructing hegemonic global capitalism in the digital age.  What we witness ultimately as readers is a decidedly bleak portrayal of the unraveling of Western culture through the metonymic disintegration of the “rational” Enlightenment human subject that created it.     back to abstracts