Bodies of Evidence: Cities and Stories in Robert McLiam Wilson's Eureka Street and Irvine Welsh's Filth (original) (raw)
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Urban Literature: A User’s Guide
Journal of Urban History, 2017
This article addresses urbanists in various fields—history, the social sciences, planning, and more—who are interested in incorporating literary works into their teaching and research and may be looking for critical approaches that connect such work to their own expertise. It begins from the premise that the traits that make a city a city present writers with opportunities to tell stories, experiment with form, make meaning, and otherwise exercise the literary imagination. When we use “urban literature” as a category of analysis, when we try to identify relationships between cities and the writing produced in and about them, we are asserting that this writing takes shape around confronting the city as a formal, social, and conceptual challenge. This article explores examples of texts ranging from Sister Carrie to I Am Legend and beyond that engage signature urban processes such as urbanization, development, and the dense overlap of orders.
Cities as Characters: a narrative possibility?
Cities have been a common sight in films since the very beginning. However, not all the portrayals of cities are stylistically similar. While in most films the city is simply a neutral backdrop in which the action takes place, having no effect in the narrative and the plot, there is a considerable number of films in which the city has significant influence in the way the story develops. Film critics and filmgoers alike tend to, time and again, declare that the “city is almost like a character” (Wickman and Berman, 2014). However, this classification may not be accurate or helpful: does it suggest that a city and a person may serve the same dramatic purpose, under certain conditions? Is the definition of “character” flexible enough to accommodate both concepts? These are the questions I hope to have an answer for by the end of this essay. However, my interest in these questions lies within a wider interest about the various ways cities can be portrayed in Film, which is, in fact, a knowledge I hope to gather and use in my creative studio practice. This essay is comprised of two chapters. The first chapter is an attempt to pin down the concepts I’ll use on the rest of the essay, as well as to identify the limitations of the common application of both concepts. The second chapter will see the findings gathered in previous chapter applied to three films: Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Patrick Keiller’s London (1994), and Kléber Mendonça Filho’s Neighboring Sounds (2012). The choice of these three films over many others is partly due to personal preference. Nevertheless, I also consider these three examples to include a very wide set of aesthetic characteristics which will illustrate the myriad ways city can be portrayed in Film. My expectation is that, by the end of the chapter, I will be able to know with a greater degree of certainty whether cities are portrayed as characters or not.
Urban Narratives: Theoretical and Methodological Aspects
KALEIDOSCOPE, Book of Abstracts, International Conference for Doctoral, Post-Doctoral Students and Young Researchers in Humanities and Social Sciences, 2023
The communication intends to present an introductory study on the notion of „urban narratives": the delimitation of the main conceptual and theoretical aspects, the determination of the defining characteristics and investigating a new possibility of „place-making” through narrative. In the era of globalization and multiculturalism, the city becomes an element of maximum reference.
'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.
Enacting Literary Geographies: Urban Narratives from Space Representation to Spatial Practices
2016
This work aims to address the emerging field of geohumanities, with particular attention to the approaches and methodologies developed in the field of literary geography. The six chapters focus on different urban contexts (North-eastern Italy's polinucleated city, international metropolises such as New York and Berlin, the Po Delta region) and disparate literary works and genres (novels, short stories collections, graphic novels and comic books) to analyse the representation and experience of contemporary urban life from a mobile geocritical perspective. Particular attention is paid to the narrative representation of urban practices, as well as to the exploration of interdisciplinary research methods informed by both urban/cultural geography and literary theory and criticism.
Charting Literary Urban Studies
Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City, 2021
Guided by the multifaceted relations between city and text, Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City attempts to chart the burgeoning field of literary urban studies by outlining how texts in varying degrees function as both representations of the city and as blueprints for its future development. The study addresses questions such as these: How do literary texts represent urban complexities-and how can they capture the uniqueness of a given city? How do literary texts simulate layers of urban memory-and how can they reinforce or help dissolve path dependencies in urban development? What role can literary studies play in interdisciplinary urban research? Are the blueprints or 'recipes' for urban development that most quickly travel around the globe-such as the 'creative city', the 'green city' or the 'smart city'-really always the ones that best solve a given problem? Or is the global spread of such travelling urban models not least a matter of their narrative packaging? In answering these key questions, this book also advances a literary studies contribution to the general theory of models, tracing a heuristic trajectory from the analysis of literary texts as representations of urban developments to an analysis of literary strategies in planning documents and other pragmatic, non-literary texts.
Srinivas Publication, 2022
Purpose: Cities have always found a place in novels, as a setting which wields influence. Much great writing across cultures has been devoted to figuring out this intangible, yet resolute influence. The city is definitely an agent of transformation in many English works of fiction and this paper highlights the works of researchers who have examined the various ways in which cities are being foregrounded to offer them prominence in the narration and make them significant players in the overall presentation. The impact on the lives of the characters, plot and narration of the novels due to the spatial and cultural ethos of the city, the ways in which the city is portrayed and the reflection of this on the reader form the gist of the findings of the research Design/Methodology/Approach: The review of literature is carried out using information from various online open access sources such as peer-reviewed journals, doctoral theses, websites and a range of portals such as Google Scholar. Findings/Result: Optimizing the reading experience to help the reader move beyond a superficially touristy perspective of the space used as a setting and engage with the city's complex social, political, historical, and cultural milieu requires a deeper study of the different ways in which the city can be foregrounded in novels. Originality/Value: This paper examines the phenomenon of the projection of space in novels and memoirs. A novel concept of the author as a literary cartographer, who makes the work of fiction come alive by not only describing the city as text but also going beyond to offer maps as an aid to the narration and in the process enriching the total reader experience, is presented. Different ways in which the city has been melded into the novel, touching upon its history, architecture and cultural aspects so as to be a significant part of the narrative and wield influence, have been identified.
Narratives on the city; an exploratory journey through time
Time and Space Edited ByMaria do Rosário Monteiro, Mário S. Ming Kong, Maria João Pereira Neto, 2023
This chapter consists of a reflection on previous works and new readings that put time, in its relationship with the contemporary city, as a fundamental argument of the human being's experience. Narrative as a practice, method, and outcome of research on Urbanism is seen as the vessel that brings together time, space, and events, giving evidence to purpose and causality. Leading authors in the renewal of contemporary thinking in the Social Sciences, Humanities, and Arts (SSHA) are considered and revisited, seeking to establish a theoretical core for future operationalization in the field of Urbanism. From this exploratory standpoint, three personal, historical, and fictional narratives explore and illustrate approaches to the contemporary city.
Mobile Media, 2007
Andy Dong is a Senior Lecturer in Design Computing and Cognition in the Faculty of Architecture, Design, and Planning at the University of Sydney. He has transformed his training in artificial intelligence, soft computing, and mechanical engineering into a research program that deals with the language of design and its politics. His research focuses on philosophical and computational studies on how design discourse comes to give an account of design practice and designed works. Andy received the Design Studies Award for the journal Design Studies in 2005 and has received several Australian Research Council grants.
The writing which this volume brings together is as multifaceted as are its objects of investigation. Ranging from theoretical or design-based perspectives to historical and politically charged foci, the chapters reflect an amalgam of concerns with the social, visual, political and material aspects of developed and developing cities. While all share a passion for cities and incorporate the use of visual material as either objects of investigation or illustrative accompaniments to textual or ethnographic analyses, the mixed methodologies and theoretical paradigms employed reflect a wider academic trend towards a critical cross-breeding of disciplines for a more expansive, and arguably more inclusive, conceptualisation of the urban. The chapters reveal the city through the lenses offered by different fields, and speak to the multiple sites involved in the production, contestation and experiences of urban spaces. Each chapter offers explorations of the spatial and temporal scales of urban transformations, centring on the authoritative and oppositional acts that simultaneously make the city. In this sense, there is an inclination towards analysing representations of urban change, and the ways in which transformations are reflected in the fabric of city space and life. The authors address the politics and experience of urban change by travelling imaginatively between the past and the present, the abstract and the specific, the global and the local, the human and the material, and the social and the technological. In their creative engagements with the many textures of `the city´, they suggest the need for us, as readers, to pause, revise, and re-envision our own sense of urban forms and futures