Urban America in the Newspaper Comic Strips of the Nineteenth Century: Introducing the Yellow Kid (original) (raw)
The literary depiction of cities in turn-of-the-twentieth-century American literature has often been carried out by protagonists with a migrant or immigrant status. The concept of the literary metropolis has in many cases been elaborated from the vantage point of a migrant gaze. In the turn-of-the-twentieth-century US, the link between urban development and migration was chiefly determined by the European and Asian immigration that contributed to the growth of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco. Yet in the present argument, the familiar figure of the foreign-born urban immigrant, however central, constitutes only one instance of a more general pattern. An analysis of urban migration must also consider cognate figures such as internal migrants—protagonists moving from small towns to the metropolis—and artistic exiles for whom a deterritorialised relation to urban space serves as guarantee of existential autonomy. The present paper tests this premise in a corpus stretching from the 1880s—the earliest decades of the American fiction of the metropolitan experience—to the 1930s, when the naturalist immigrant novel became a prominent feature of US literature. These works construct a perception of urban space that plays off against one another mutually non-exclusive subject positions linked to specific chronotopes: the urban pioneer, the urban villager, and the flâneur aesthete. In so doing, this study makes it possible to bring forth continuities in the American literary representation of urban space cutting across supposedly distinct literary periods (realism, naturalism, modernism).
Representing urban America: 19th-century views of landscape, space, and power
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 1993
Approximately 5000 lithographic views of cities across America were produced and copies were widely disseminated in the century after 1825, In this paper, urban lithographs are examined as landscape texts in light of contemporary notions of space, vision, representation, and power. A major shift in the genre of urban representation from ‘pictorial’ to ‘bird's-eye’ views is presented as capturing the story of an emerging industrial-capitalist order; as embodying the place of the individual within that order; and as actively legitimating/promoting particular visions of change and progress. Interpreting urban views illustrates the problematic nature of representation and the need to examine particular landscapes/representations within their cultural contexts.
New England Journal of Public Policy, 2015
What is a city? Well we might ask, for today the city as we have known itparticularly New York City, which has long reflected the state of the nation at its best and its worst-is a disintegrating entity, a depleted idea, a diminished thing. The decline of the city, as emblem and actuality, is eroding the nation's stated commitment to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. For it is the gritty city, particularly New York City, rather than the fabled New England village that has stood as the last hope for American democracy. the place where "aliens"-the huddled masses from across the Atlantic and the internal emigrés from the heart of the country-have arrived with great expectations, and it is the city that has transformed them into committed members of the body politic. As America abandons its cities, while protecting its urban and suburban enclaves of wealth, commerce, and high-income residences, its poor citizens are sentenced to a life of diminished expectations, danger, disease, and despair that flares into occasional violence and self-destructiveness. Lewis Mumford, distinguished urban analyst, articulated his urban ideal in The Culture of Cities (1938). The city, as one finds it in history, is the point of maximum concentration for the power and culture of a community. It is the place where the diffused rays of many separate beams of life fall into focus, with gains in both social effectiveness and significance. The city is the form and symbol of an integrated social relationship: it is the seat of the temple, the market, the hall of justice, the academy of learning. Here is where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order. Here is where the issues of civilization are focused: here, too, ritual passes on occasion into the active drama of a fully differentiated and selfconscious society. 1 Mumford stressed the goals of unity, cohesion, and coherence: for him the city should compose, out of its diverse residents and elements, one living and nurturing organism. However, he lived long enough to see his ideal vision crumble and his beloved Manhattan, the personification of that ideal, decline and fall from grace. Born in Flushing, Queens, in 1895, Mumford, who called himself "a child of the city," grew up on Manhattan's Upper West Side in a "typical New York brownstone," though all of the city became his landscape of discovery: the streets were the leaves of grass through which he walked, and New England Journal of Public Policy the port of New York stood as his frontier, his Walden Pond. "Not merely was I a city boy but a New Yorker, indeed a son of Manhattan, who looked upon specimens from all other cities as provincial-especially Brooklynites," he confessed in Sketches from Life (1982). Despite its problems, deriving from vast inequities of wealth, the New York of Mumford's youth offered "a moral stability and security" which, by the 1970s, when New York City nearly went bankrupt, was long gone. As a distinguished elderly man, Mumford looked back on his old New York with wonder and ahead to an increasingly horrific New York with despair. "More than once lately in New York I have felt as Petrarch reports himself feeling in the fourteenth century, when he compared the desolate, wolfish, robber-infested Provence of his maturity, in the wake of the Black Plague, with the safe, prosperous region of his youth." 2 Mumford's memoir, so full of resonant remembrances of things past, traces his development from youth, before World War I, to coming of age as one of America's most influential cultural critics, between the wars, then to the alienated sense of a "displaced person" in modern, plague-ridden Manhattan. He is blunt, explicit, and denunciatory, like an Old Testament prophet, in his assessment of contemporary New York. "The city I once knew so intimately has been wrecked; most of what remains will soon vanish; and therewith scattered fragments of my own life will disappear in the rubble that is carried away." 3 Sunk also, like the fabled Atlantis, was Mumford's ideal vision of the city, "where human experience is transformed into viable signs, symbols, patterns of conduct, systems of order." We now know that our cities-particularly New York City, America's Gotham or Metropolis, a city in desperate and perpetual need of rescue, as represented in popular culture by Batman, Superman, or even Ghostbusters!-have arrived at the point of the maximum diffusion of power and fragmentation of culture, a dissolving center of centrifugal forces that results in chaos and entropy. There, indeed, is where the issues and seemingly irresolvable problems of civilization are focused; there, too, are acted out the dramas of a fully differentiated and self-conscious society now in disarray and decay. In the cities the economic gap between rich and poor is dramatized. Since World War II, small manufacturing plants and sweatshops, which for more than a century have exploited but also sustained immigrants and other members of the underclass, have disappeared, like a receding tide (often to foreign shores), and these groups, composed largely of minorities, have been left behind, stranded on the beach, to fight one another over what little remains-as blacks attacked Koreans in south central Los Angeles during the riots of spring 1992. There, in the republic's center cities, things have fallen apart; the center has not held. (New York did not bum after the LA riots, to