![]() The same kind of aesthetic crisis is provoked by the novel itself, because it frustrates expectations and eludes a clear genre, and readers can respond in analogous ways: with the urge to impose allegorical meaning and genre borders, or with a more refined perceptual sense. ![]() Crisis does not entail a specific political (or artistic) response, however, since it can traumatize into complacency and xenophobia just as easily as expand one’s commitments. Miéville depicts the continuous crises of urban existence-chemical spills, refugees seeking asylum, even a weed growing in the wrong place-as so many possibilities for metonymically grasping the larger ontological and political reality. I argue that this perceptual disorientation, or aesthetic crisis, embodies the politics of the novel. Cities are so deeply textured, and so continually scattered by the circulations of their component parts, that we cannot perceive them as a whole the borders we use to define them are ultimately arbitrary. China Miéville’s novel The City & The City (2009) presents the city as a massively ramified ecosystem that comprises humans, other species, and objects, and is also embedded in larger systems like capitalism and environmental catastrophe. ![]() Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies. ![]()
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