Viewing and reviewing the city from romantic to postmodern lenses: An analysis of 5 poems on Kuala Lumpur

• Main Author: Mohd Ramli, Aimillia
• Format: Conference or Workshop Item
• Language: English; English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: PR English literature
• Online Access: http://irep.iium.edu.my/62168/8/62168-program.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/62168/9/62168-Viewing%20and%20Reviewing%20the%20City%20from%20Romantic%20to%20Postmodern%20Lenses.pdf; http://irep.iium.edu.my/62168/; https://asiapac2017.wordpress.com/

While cities around the world are being “read” in literary studies as cosmopolitan and contested terrains, Kuala Lumpur seems to have escaped a similar fate. There are a good many reasons for this but the one that has stood out time and again is that this city, the capital city of Malaysia, has been persistently represented in Malaysian literature through a narrow Romantic lens that tend to negatively depict modern metropolitan life in favour of the benign inØuence of the countryside. Yet, in the last ten years and in a number of creative writings on Kuala Lumpur, this trend has started to change as there is a growing acceptance of the city as a postmodern hub of social and cultural diversities. This paper is a study of this transformation in 5 selected poems that were published from 1960s up to 2017.