Kolocotroni, V. (2023) Hotel Trouble. In: Despotopoulou, A., Kolocotroni, V. and Mitsi, E. (eds.) Hotel Modernisms. Series: Among the Victorians and Modernists. Routledge: London. ISBN 9781032081274 (doi: 10.4324/9781003213079-2)
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Abstract
This essay revisits the hotel as a site of trouble. Though central to the hotel experience in modernism, the narrative of crisis and social mobility and transformation, achieved or thwarted, does not exhaust or fully account for the kinds of trouble I sample in this essay. Beyond the contingent features of the social anthropology of hotel types (Joseph Roth; Norman S. Hayner) and the inter-war “hotel consciousness” (Paul Fussell), lies a repertoire of tropes that turn the hotel into a site of cognitive and emotional dissonance, of memory and forgetting, of haunting, ruination, and risk. These range from the game of lost and recovered love crystallized in the rooms and windows of Marcel Proust’s Grand Hotels, the vertiginous pursuit of the ghosts of history in hotels haunted by W. G. Sebald, to Benjaminian palimpsests of hotel ruins, and the mysterious, willful acts of self-effacement of such “hotel women”-cum-modernist Sphinxes as André Breton’s Nadja.
| Item Type: | Book Sections |
|---|---|
| Keywords: | Hotels, modernity, modernism, Proust, Benjamin, Breton, Sebald. |
| Status: | Published |
| Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: | Kolocotroni, Dr Vassiliki |
| Authors: | Kolocotroni, V. |
| College/School: | College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature |
| Publisher: | Routledge |
| ISBN: | 9781032081274 |
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