Prikazi New Orleansa kao grada luke u suvremenoj američkoj prozi

Over the past fifteen years, interest in the literary tradition of New Orleans and its representations as a city with mythic status in national and global imagination has grown steadily. New Orleans is recognized as a unique American urban space, distinguished by its multilayered postcolonial and postindustrial heritage, as well as its geomorphological, climatic, and sociocultural characteristics as a port city. The need to better understand and organize knowledge about the city's self-representations and its portrayals in literature arose after Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath, offering a counterbalance to problematic narratives spread by the media and other forms of public discourse from outside the city. This thesis examines how the city, as an imagined community, represents and envisions itself in relation to other paradigmatic circles to which it belongs as a constitutive part or “other space” (the American South, the US as a whole, circum-Caribbean and circum-Atlantic world, etc.). Assuming that the complex and multilayered literary tradition of New Orleans provides insights into broader contexts for understanding the contemporary American urban experience, the dissertation presents an overview and analysis of a selected corpus of recent American novels published between 1980 and 2020 that illustrate literary representations of the city, its chronotopes, and ongoing myths. The analysis is conducted through textual, intertextual, and contextual readings of the corpus, considering the overarching perspective of the port city as a complex liminal space characterized by perceived exceptionalism and creolization. The unique local experience is shaped by a broader network of sea and river mobility involving people, cultures, goods, and economies. By applying the umbrella term and perspective of the port city to New Orleans’s literary tradition, its literary space becomes accessible for analysis using methods from literary theory (chronotope, genre theory, mythopoetics), cultural studies (memory studies, semiology, creolization), American studies, spatiality theories (spatial turn, geocriticism, blue humanities, transnational approaches), and the Mediterranean paradigm. The theoretical framework relies on overarching metaphors of liminality (character selection, spaces of tension and paradox, creation of new worlds) and the aesthetics of decay (gothic mode, decadence, Eros and Thanatos, and similar leitmotifs). The time period of the present corpus was defined by the publication of John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces (1980), a novel that both subverts recurring narratives and myths of the city and anticipates major analytical topics such as liminality, the aesthetics of decay, the relationship to urbanity and modernity, and the economy of the port city. The analysis shows that Toole specifically uses an ancient Mediterranean genre, Menippean satire, to depict contemporary urban life in the United States, demonstrating its unique suitability for creating the literary world of a bustling port city and its decaying economies, and revealing its chronotope as that of a 'broken Mediterranean'. With the picaresque protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, the author created a critical outsider of New Orleans and contemporary American society, who does not participate in the economic imperative of the port city. Second part of the analysis examines two neohistorical novels from the turn of the millennium, Property by Valerie Martin and Yellow Jack by Josh Russell, both published before Katrina and set in the first half of the 19th century. These novels reveal the chronotope of the port city as a necropolis and a site of multiple crises, including slave uprisings that threatened the stability of the plantation system and deadly epidemics of yellow fever and other infectious diseases. At the same time, the enduring power of the myth of the city embodied as a woman reflects another aspect of its aesthetics of decay, its femininity in relation to its impending doom. The most recent section of the corpus includes texts written in the post-Katrina period. It highlights the distinction between the original Katrina archive and later texts, which do not focus primarily on the hurricane as a central theme or chronotope, but instead incorporate it into the longue durée of the city's collective memory through multigenerational narratives of local Creole families. These representations reveal a rarely depicted and promoted version of the city's marginalized working majority, who help promote commodified narratives that erode cultural authenticity, while also offering a counter-narrative to official sites of memory through their own environments of memory, pointing out the liminal tensions of co-existing narratives as a continuity of the port city. The aim of our methodology was to contribute to American studies in Croatia by analyzing New Orleans in its literary spaces as a unique American city, as well as to bring a humanities perspective to the existing interdisciplinary field of contemporary urban theory dealing with port cities, thus contributing to a better understanding of them.