Urban Space and Representation

by Balshaw, Maria; Kennedy, Liam

• ISBN13: 9780745313498
• ISBN10: 0745313493
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1999-12-20
• Publisher: Pluto Press

Summary

Theories of urban space have become the focus of a great deal of work by scholars in cultural geography, urban studies and critical theory. This volume contributes to that debate by analysing the relationship between theories of urban space and literary and visual representations of the city an emergent area of confluence in literary, film and cultural studies. The contributors address themes such as visual culture and spectacle; class and capital; community and public space; and nation, diaspora and belonging. Cities covered include New York, Chicago, Jerusalem, Paris, London, Birmingham and Freetown, Sierra Leone. Artists and writers discussed include Piet Mondrian, Nella Larsen, Rudolph Fisher, Amos Oz, David Grossman, Sarah Schulman, Jonathan Larsen, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Paul Auster and Wayne Wang.

Author Biography

Maria Balshaw is a research fellow in American Literature at the University of Birmingham and the author of City of Refuge : Race, Urban Space and Twentieth-Century African American Literature (Pluto Press, forthcoming). Liam Kennedy is a senior lecturer in American Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements	vii
Introduction: Urban Space and Representation	1	(24)
Maria Balshaw
Liam Kennedy
Space and Vision
City Sights: Mapping and Representing New York City	25	(14)
Douglas Tallack
A Tale of Two Cities: Urban Text and Image in The Sweet Flypaper of Life	39	(16)
Richard Ings
From the Sofa to the Crime Scene: Skycam, Local News and the Televisual City	55	(16)
Pascal Pinck
Spaces of Difference
Fear and Sympathy: Charles Dickens and Urban (Dis) Ability	71	(11)
Al Deakin
Elegies to Harlem: Looking For Langston and Jazz	82	(16)
Maria Balshaw
The Brooklyn Cigar Co. as Dialogic Public Sphere: Community and Postmodernism in Paul Auster and Wayne Wang's Smoke and Blue in the Face	98	(18)
Peter Brooker
Paranoid Spatiality: Postmodern Urbanism and American Cinema	116	(15)
Liam Kennedy
(Post) National Spaces
The film de banlieue: Renegotiating the Representation of Urban Space	131	(15)
Myrto Konstantarakos
`Whose Fucking Park? Our Fucking Park!': Bohemian Brumaires (Paris 1848/East Village 1988), Gentrification, and the Representation of Aids	146	(16)
Stephen Shapiro
Metropolis of the Midlands	162	(13)
Gargi Bhattacharyya
Singapore Soil: A Completely Different Organisation of Space	175	(21)
John Phillips
Notes on Contributors	196	(2)
Index	198