Brooklyn Bound: Arthur Miller, Hubert Selby Jr. and Competing View of Modern Urban Realism (original) (raw)
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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).
Brooklyn Gentrification and The Act of Settling in Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles
Humanities, 2021
This article takes the idea that Brooklyn fictions are centrally concerned with authenticity as its starting point. It situates literary Brooklyn and the pull of authenticity in relation to the United States at the national level. Thinking about Brooklyn gentrification demands one to be necessarily cognizant of the borough as a social, cultural, economic, and psychological space within the context of the US as a nation-state. I argue that Lionel Shriver's The Mandibles (2016), whose titular characters are enactors of both Brooklyn gentrification and a romanticized act of settlement in a new nation-state, exemplifies this link between gentrification at the local level and a search for an authenticity at the national level. Through a reading of the novel, I argue that Brooklyn gentrification is intimately bound with US settler colonialism, which in The Mandibles is sustained by its representations of finance and the whiteness of its narrative focalization.
New York City's streets, parks, museums, architecture, and its people appear in an array of literary works published from New York's earliest settlement to the present day. The exploration of the city as both a symbol and as a reality has formed the basis of New York's literature. Using the themes of adaptation, innovation, identity, and hope, this history explores novels, poetry, periodicals, and newspapers to examine how New York's literature can be understood through the notion of movement. From the periodicals of the nineteenth century, the Arabic writers of the city in the early twentieth century, the literature of homelessness, childhood, and the spaces of tragedy and resilience within the metropolis, this diverse assessment opens up new areas of research within urban literature. It provides an innovative examination of how writing has shaped the lives of New Yorkers and how writing about the city has shaped the modern world.
'Fictions of the City' reviewed by Richard Hornsey
Over the last couple of decades, the critical investigation of the constitutive links between literature and urban modernity has been a steadily expanding field. Through ongoing interdisciplinary dialogues with cultural geography and urban cultural studies, literary scholars have become not only more aware of how various types of writing have made sense of the disjointed flow of metropolitan experience, but of their larger contributions to the formation of urban imaginaries and ongoing cultural debates about the meanings of city life. Matthew Taunton's Fictions of the City and David Welsh's Underground Writing are two welcome additions to this body of work. Both books set out to provide a historical survey of how literature (and in Taunton's case, film) has engaged with a particular aspect of the built urban environment -the mass housing of London and Paris, and the London Underground, respectively -while situating the texts they examine within wider conversations around speculative development and municipal civic policy. These two volumes have markedly different provenances; Fictions of the City is based on Taunton's recent PhD thesis, while Underground Writing has its roots in Welsh's considerable experience as both an employee of London Transport and a community oral historian. They thus arrive at contrasting moments in the two authors' careers and this has given each book its own set of qualities, which marks them apart in both style and tone.
READING AND WRITING THE CITY IN MODERNIST FICTION
Reading and Writing the City in Modernist Fiction, 2015
This article starts from the premise that in order to make sense of the protean, complex and challenging reality of the city, modernist writers like Joyce and Woolf first purported to read it, and then to write about it. In doing so, they looked at its signs, and also at its gaps and silences. Woolf was interested in thinking spaciously, fusing masculinity and femininity in the perfectly balanced androgynous mind. The city provides her with the respite from its hustle and bustle, and also with the elements (signs and signals) which she arranges in a pattern whose geometry fuses them. Sometimes she shows us minds revelling in the city traffic, while some other times she captures the shock the mind receives when associated stimuli strike it. Joyce has Stephen Dedalus standing on the steps of the library and pondering on birds flying like words flowing on a page, or later in Ulysses he explores the "ineluctable modality of the visible" and "the ineluctable modality of the audible", looking for the signs he needs.
Storied cities: Bret Easton Ellis and the urban literary tradition
2016
This thesis is an attempt to reassess and re-position the work of Bret Easton Ellis. It seeks to determine, through close textual analysis and with particular attention to the epigraphs and allusions he employs, whether “blank fiction” and Postmodernism adequately describe the ideological tradition of writing to which Ellis belongs. Noting the central role that urban space occupies in Ellis’s oeuvre, it asks to what extent can the disturbed minds of his protagonists be seen as resulting from the alienating city environments in which they dwell, and can we ally Ellis’s project to the classical eighteenth and nineteenth-century urban literary texts he references? In reading against a prose style that invites its readers to skim, Ellis’s citations signal that he does not intend his novels to be merely a commentary upon adolescent apathy, 1980s capitalist greed, or 1990s celebrity obsession – the dominant critical interpretations of his key novels – but, in a vision far more closely ali...