ELIAS CANETTI'S CITIES

This paper explores Elias Canetti's mapping of his biography and intellectual development on to a network of cities across Europe and beyond. It interrogates the tension between his assertion of the clear personal significance of certain cities and a fundamental ambiguity that characterizes his recounted engagements with, and retreats from, the potentially overwhelming intensity of modern urban experience. The terms in which cities are described - from Rustchuk to Marrakech, from London to Vienna, from Zurich to Berlin, and so on - are negotiated within an idiosyncratic economy of meaning. Throughout Canetti's non-fictional writings, their significance is repeatedly contested between extremes: between personal and historical association, between the intellect and the senses, between divine and demonic connotation, between the potentials of creativity and destruction, and between narratives of loss and those of personal redemption.