GEMA Online ® Journal of Language Studies Volume 16(2), June 2016 ISSN: 1675-8021 141 The City in Man: Foregrounding Psychogeography in The Blind Owl and City of Glass Pedram Lalbakhsh p.lalbakhsh@razi.ac.ir Faculty of Humanities, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran Pouria Torkamaneh pouriatorkamaneh@yahoo.com Faculty of Humanities, Razi University, Kermanshah, Iran ABSTRACT New York City in Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Ray in Sadeq Hedayat’s The Blind Owl testify to the presence of a wasteland, setting in motion an unavoidable sense of nostalgia, confusion and fragmentation upon the protagonists. The present article argues that the pictures painted of the two metropolises with their specific cramped urban spaces function as culpable agents influencing Quinn as a New Yorker and Hedayat’s narrator as a resident of Ray. The paper builds its argument upon Merlin Coverley’s concept of psychogeography which supports transformation of the city as an integral part of the main characters’ fates. Further, the article illustrates how in Hedayat and Auster’s pieces the city reigns triumphant as the main characters fall victim to hallucination and isolation, or are left with desperate choices: in Hedayat’s novella murder or acceptance of misery and in Auster’s the sudden disappearance from the city and the plot horizons. To further support the argument advanced in this research, we take into account Tötösy de Zepetnek’s method of comparative literature and culture and its idea of parallelization that emphasizes the existence of similar social evolutions represented through the literature of various nations and carried out through the use of comparable literary conventions and symbols to stress their concerns. Keywords: The Blind Owl; City of Glass; psychogeography; nostalgia; urban space “One man’s city is the sum of all the routes he takes through it, a spoor as unique as a finger print” (Jonathan Raban, Soft City, 1998). INTRODUCTION Literary perception of a landscape works as an alternative means to present the experiences and tendencies of writers in different periods whose subjective perceptions and motives seem markedly different from those of objective geographers. Eric Prieto believes that “literature provides a precious resource for geographers because of its ability to document in the most intimate, innovative, and detailed ways the personality of a place” (2012, p. 9). Malpas relates living place to “human identity and claims, and states “there is good reason to suppose that the human relationship to place is a fundamental structure in what makes possible the sort of life that is characteristically human” (2004, p. 13). As such, novels, poems, short stories, plays, and memoirs are literary forms that pass on valuable sources of information and mirror deeply the sensibilities and predilections of individuals or ethnic groups in various regions. However, while terms like literary geography or geographical literature do seem to