SYLVIA PLATH’S DARK NEW YORK VS CELLA SERGHI’S CRAMPED BUCHAREST WITH REGARDS TO BOSTON, CONSTANȚA AND BALCHIK

Abstract

This article compares the literary representations of two capital cities – New York and Bucharest in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar and Cella Serghi’s The Spider’s Web respectively. The analysis examines the habitation of the urban spaces in the two novels with regard to both authors’ depression. It also delineates the dimensions of the protagonists’ identification with the big city as well as some of the specifics of the feminine presence in the respective epochs and cities. Of importance is the actual lived experience of the two writers and its rendition into autofiction. Another aim is to compare the writers’ responses to early twentieth-century modernism, with one writer living in the epoch, and the other writing 20 years later. The comparison is effectuated in compliance with the framework of Comparative literature in the 21st century according to Ben Hutchinson in his Comparative Literature: A Very Short Introduction. In its analysis the article also draws on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception.