Marty Gilroy
- School: English, Drama and Film
- Supervisor: Dr Sharae Deckard
Reading the World City: New York, London and the Capitalist World-System in the Contemporary Post-Crash Novel
Marty’s research investigates the representation of global economic crisis in contemporary post-crash fiction set in urban financial centres, exploring how the New York and London settings of “world-city” novels act as microcosms of the world-economy. These “bust” fictions utilise urban settings to mediate the social traumas attendant on the 2008 financial crisis, and their aesthetics and content are informed by a heightened consciousness of the socio-economic hierarchies structuring the interrelations of core and semi-peripheral cities in what John Friedmann has called the capitalist “world-city formation”. Fredric Jameson’s earlier work on postmodernism famously argues that the global forces structuring daily life in core cities under late capitalism produce challenges to fictional representation. This research will demonstrate how these texts revitalise the artistic project of "cognitive mapping" and develop new formal structures through which to address the scale of the world-system and the relationship between individuals and global forces.
PhD Candidate, 2018 - present - University College Dublin
M.A. Modernity, Literature and Culture, 2014 - University College Dublin
B.A. English and History, 2013 - University College Dublin
Funded by the Irish Research Council