Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity explores the narrative formations of urbanity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within the framework of the “spatial turn,” contributors from disciplines ranging from geography and history to literary and media studies theorize narrative constructions of the city and cities, and analyze relevant examples from a variety of discourses, media, and cities. Subdivided into six sections, the book explores the interactions of city and text—as well as other media—and the conflicting narratives that arise in these interactions. Offering case studies that discuss specific aspects of the narrative construction of Berlin and London, the text also considers narratives of urban discontinuity and their theoretical implications. Ultimately, this volume captures the narratological, artistic, material, social, and performative possibilities inherent in spatial representations of the city.
Author(s): Martin Kindermann, Rebekka Rohleder
Series: Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2020
Language: English
Pages: 338
City: Cham
Series Editor’s Preface
Acknowledgments
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
1 Introduction: Exploring the Spatiality of the City Across Cultural Texts
The City in Times of the “Spatial Turn”
Language, Narration, Semantics
Subversion and Variation
Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity
Bibliography
Part I The City and the Text/the City as a Text
2 City Scripts/City Scapes: On the Intertextuality of Urban Experience
Experiencing the City
Turning-Point: Mimesis into Performance
Performing the City
Bibliography
3 (Urban) Sacred Places and Profane Spaces—Theological Topography in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Preliminary Remarks
Sacredness and Civitas: Augustine and the Idea of the “Two Cities”
Religious Readings of Space—“the Sacred” and Place
“The Mundane is Sin”: London’s City in “The Burial of The Dead”
Engaging with Urban Holiness: St Magnus the Martyr in “the Fire Sermon”
Falling Towers and Holy Waters in “What the Thunder Said”
Conclusion
References
4 Traveling Discourses: The Works of Pavel Ulitin (1918–1986) and the Problem of Narrative Alternatives
Introduction
Textual Spaces and Cognitive Mapping
Prose Alternatives in the Russian Literary Tradition
Narrative Form, Spacial Composition, and the Writing Process in the Ulitin’s Prose
Parallels Within the Global Context: W.S. Burroughs’ Cut-Ups
Conclusion
Bibliography
Part II Television Reading the City
5 “This America, Man.” Narrating and Reading Urban Space in The Wire
“Building a City”—The Narrative Space of The Wire
Reading Urbanity in The Wire
Narrating Urban Space in The Wire
Works Cited
6 Reading the City: “Mind Mapping” in Sherlock
Cityscape in Sherlock
Transmediality and the Digital in Sherlock
Navigating the City in Sherlock
Dimensions of Deduction in Sherlock
Merging Spaces in Sherlock
The City as Playground in Sherlock
Urban Mind Mapping in Sherlock
Literature
Part III Conflicting Narratives
7 Transcription: Addressing the Interactivity Between Urban and Architectural Spaces and Their Use
Transcription: Social, Experimental, and Interactive
Urban Space and Social Practice
The Role of Stories: Narrative as an Analytical Tool
Transcription: Architectural Perspectives
Daniel Libeskind: Experimental Processes of Writing and Design
Peter Eisenman: Exploring the Dynamics of Text and Architecture
References
8 Politics and the Production of Space: Downtown and Out with Rancière and Lefebvre
Lefebvre with Rancière
Mediation and the Parallax of the Critique of Political Economy
Communist Geography and Circulation Struggles
Coda
Works Cited
9 The People of New Jerusalem: Narratives of Social In- and Exclusion in Rotterdam After the Blitz of 1940
Introduction
New Jerusalemism in Rotterdam
Building the Urban Community of Rotterdam
Social Misfits and “Unofficial” Communities
Conclusion
Bibliography
10 Smart City Narratives and Narrating Smart Urbanism
Introduction
Critical Perspectives on Smart City Narratives
A Critique of Powerful ICT Corporations and their Modernization Promises
A Critique of Entrepreneurial Urbanization
A Critique of the Influence of Platform Economies on Smart Urbanism
Narrating Smart Cities: The Production of Space
Biopolitics and “Environmentalities”
Re-Acting, Governing and Participation
Digital Divide
Smart Urbanism and Digital Urban Cultures
References
Part IV Contesting the City I: Women on the Streets of London
11 Poetic Mobility and the Location of an Anglo-Jewish Self: Amy Levy’s and Elaine Feinstein’s Cityscapes
Constructing Urban Relations
Deviant Mobility
Exploring Hybridity
Poetic Mobility and Urban Polyvalence
Works Cited
12 Gender and the City: Virginia Woolf’s London Between Promise of Freedom and Structural Confinement
Works Cited
Part V Contesting the City II: Berlin, History and Memory
13 The City Stripped Bare of Its Histories, Even: Crisis and Representation in Two German Trümmerfilme of 1948
Metalepsis and Focalization: Narrativity and Identification
Palingenesis and Stasis: The City Between History and Futurity
Berliner Ballade:Fatalism and Fantasy
Und wieder ’48:Repetition, Ruin and Revolution
Works Cited
14 “A ‘Bridgehead’ in the Visible Domain”: Chloe Aridjis’s, J. S. Marcus’s and Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s Tales of Berlin
Introduction
The Countess Ida. A Tale of Berlin
The Captain’s Fire and Book of Clouds
Conclusion
Works Cited
Part VI Dis/Continuities
15 Finding Causes for Events: The City as Normative Narrative
Literary Spaces and “Degenerate Inhabitants”
Narratives of a Static City
Narratives of Urban Transformation
Works Cited
16 Private Topographies: Visions of Tōkyō in Modern Japanese Literature
Cityscapes, Mindscapes, and a Foreign Modernity: Edo Becomes Tōkyō
Edo’s Fortunes: hanjōkimono
Tōkyō of the Water: Kōda Rohan (1867–1947)
Marginalized Spaces: Higuchi Ichiyō (1872–1896)
Sensing the City: Nagai Kafū
Private Topographies
Bibliography
17 Reading Against the Grain: Black Presence in Lower Manhattan, New York City
The Architectural Site
The Black Atlantic
1. Reading Beyond the Architectural Narrative
2. Reading the Narrative of Memory
3. Reading the Narrative of Oblivion
Conclusion: Reading the City Critically
Bibliography
Index
