Actors &; Networks in the Megacity : A Literary Analysis of Urban Narratives

This study is a concise introduction to Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory and its application in a literary analysis of urban narratives of the 21st century. Are these literary documentaries a contemporary solution to reporting an ever-evasive reality? If so, how do they embody "matters of concern" as Latour would have put it, laying bare modern-day "actors" and "networks" rather than documenting mere "matters of fact"? In answering these questions, the author describes how these narratives function as sites of knowledge production, particularly in light of the development of historiography and empirical documentation since modernism. We thus encounter an inter-disciplinary framework that addresses concerns and questions of epistemology, the sociology of knowledge and urban and documentary studies.