Tales of the City: A Study of Narrative and Urban Life

by Ruth Finnegan

• ISBN13: 9780521623346
• ISBN10: 0521623340
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1998-11-13
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

How do we picture urban life and formulate our experience of it? Tales of the City brings together the academics' abstract tales with the vivid stories about a particular city, Milton Keynes, and the often moving self narrations of its residents. It explores the role of story-telling processes for the creative constructing of experience, with particular attention to personal narrations. The story that is now emerging, told by many individual actor narrators, is of the city as a natural setting for human life, in stark contrast to the pessimistic anti-urban tales of many academic narrators. Drawing on narrative studies, cultural and linguistic anthropology and social theory, Professor Finnegan skillfully examines the narrative conventions and cultural implications of our multiple tales of the city, and relates them to profound mythic themes about urban life, community, and to the creative role of the active, reflecting individual.

Table of Contents

List of figures	vii	(2)
Preface	ix	(3)
Acknowledgements	xii
1 Story: `the orders by which we live our lives'	1	(13)
Perspectives on narrative	4	(5)
What's in a `story'?	9	(5)
2 Abstract tales of cities: the narrative in urban theory	14	(10)
Temporal ordering and urban theories	15	(3)
Plot and coherence in the academic tales	18	(2)
The universal in the particular	20	(1)
Conventions of academic story-telling	21	(3)
3 Storying a concrete city: cows, gardens and other urban tales	24	(32)
The planners' tale: a story of destiny fulfilled	25	(11)
Tales of Utopias and garden cities	36	(5)
Milton Keynes: realm of the dreadful dragon and the concrete cows?	41	(6)
`Not just the concrete cows': stories of history and humanity	47	(9)
4 Storied lives: the tales of individual urban dwellers	56	(26)
The personal narratives	57	(2)
Brenda Dawson's tale	59	(14)
Performance and text: story-telling as well as story	73	(9)
5 `That's my story': narrative conventions in personal tales	82	(42)
George Rowe's tale	82	(7)
Time and event in the personal stories	89	(4)
Bessie Wyatt's tale	93	(5)
The dramatis personae	98	(3)
Explanatory frames: continuity, avocation and the individual `I'	101	(5)
Shirley Lambert's tale	106	(8)
The creative actor and author	114	(10)
6 Personal narratives and urban images	124	(41)
Lucy Dale's tale	124	(7)
Tales of Fishermead and the place of `place'	131	(7)
Rachel Jacobs' tale	138	(9)
Adventures of moving, housing and home	147	(6)
Intimations of community	153	(2)
Urban mythology, new city and the creativity of narrative	155	(10)
7 Conclusion: whose stories of the city?	165	(16)
Interacting stories	166	(5)
Story-telling for the city and its tellers	171	(10)
Appendix 1 Note on sources and methods	181	(2)
Appendix 2 The personal narrators	183	(7)
Notes	190	(3)
References	193	(12)
Index	205