Deconstructing Post-WWII New York City: The Literature, Art, Jazz, and Architecture of an Emerging Global Capital

by Bennett,Robert

• ISBN13: 9780415946063
• ISBN10: 0415946069
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-07-29
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Situating post-WWII New York literature within the material context of American urban history, this work analyzes how literary movements such as the Beat Generation, the New York poets and Black Arts Moment criticized the spatial restructuring of post-WWII New York City. Rejecting the dominant trends in post-WWII American urbanism--from International Style Modernist corporate architecture to suburban sprawl--as material expressions of corporate capitalism, these writers attempted to imagine alternative, more democratic and more multicultural, urban possibilities.

Table of Contents

Illustrations	xi
Acknowledgments	xiii
Introduction ``Little Boxes Made of Ticky-Tacky...Little Boxes All the Same'': Deconstructing the Socio-Spatial Regime of Post-WWII New York City	3	(24)
Constructing the Post-WWII Megalopolitan Subject: The Socio-Spatial Ideology of the 1939--40 New York World's Fair	27	(26)
``Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs!'': Deconstructing the Architexture of International Style Modernism	53	(16)
The ``eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities'': The Liquid Geometries of Post-WWII Jazz Literature	69	(16)
``I am for an art that does something other than sit on its ass in a museum'': Envisioning Alternative Utopic Urban Spaces	85	(22)
Conclusion ``Less is a bore'': Imagining the Postmodern City	107	(8)
Bibliography	115	(8)
Index	123