The concept of identity in postmodern literature: the urban subject in the dystopian city : Paul Auster's In the country of last things

Abstract

Introduction From the emergence of the term Utopia in Thomas More’s book of the same name, many controversial and prolific discussions have appeared throughout time. These discussions involved not only cultural and sociological aspects, but also those concerned more with the inner dimension of the self: his desires, ambitions and transformations. What More really meant by using this term we have no certainty, because in it he refers to several different factors that have an effect in the life of the island portrayed in his book. In opposition to Utopia, meaning “a happy place where a person has nothing to worry about because his/her government provides everything they need”, there is Dystopia, which could be defined as “a society being controlled by a repressive state, in both individual and collective ways”. Starting from this point, the general topic that gives rise to the object of study in this work is the urban subject, Anna Blume in Paul Auster’s In the Country of Last Things, immersed in a dystopian city nearly to be extinguished and conditioned by spaces that exert powerful forces on the prevalence of the self.