Scripting Urban Culture II

This volume represents the second of two special issues published by Studies in the Literary Imagination on the city and its representation in literature and film. Moving chronologically forward from the nineteenth and early-twentieth century focus of the first issue's contributions, the essays collected here treat Modernist and contemporary representations of urban space, culture, economics, and politics. The overarching approach among these writers is to see the city as a zone of contest, if not conflict, where sometimes disparate national, ethnic, and class interests are mediated through the elaborate workings and tangled discursive geography of urban space. Contrary to the idealistic notion that the city as a phenomenon embodies the perfect, uniform realization of post-Enlightenment rationality or serves as the unblemished symbol of modern progress, we see, instead, here, how historically, and even now, in our new millennial moment, the city so often constitutes the theater where tensions of identity or ideology play themselves out in dramatic dispute. The volume begins with a thoughtful consideration of the city's economic terrain. Linnie Blake's Dean Howells and the City of New York: A Hazard of New Writing argues that William Dean Howells pioneered a mode of urban writing that was itself pervaded by the spirit of capitalism. According to Blake, Howells focused his critical attention on the spiritualized materiality of the monetary economy which underpinned notions of individual, urban, and national identity in America as surely as it built and maintained the city in the world. In the face of metropolitanization, mass culturalization, and large scale clashes between class-based and ethnically divided interest groups, Howells thus pioneered a vision of the city as a battleground on which competing sectors of the population struggled over the meaning of American selfhood. Blake demonstrates persuasively that for Howells, the spectacle of the city had come to stand as an overt metaphor for the confusing and conflictual dynamics of modern American life, and urban fiction had became a means of demystifying the spiritualized materiality of the capitalist economy, exploring and explaining the all too perceptible gap between ideal and material Americas. In examining that lacuna, Howells thus attempted to generate an entirely new and self-consciously modern literary aesthetic from out of the city's material conditions. Resting as it did on an analysis of the contradictions of capitalist modernity, that aesthetic was generically realist, methodologically determinist, and ideologically anti-capitalist. But for all its materiality, it was every bit as concerned with the transcendent meaning of modern American life as the work of earlier writers of the American canon, from Poe to Melville to Whitman, had ever been. Robert Brazeau's paper, O'Casey's Dublin Trilogy and the 'Promise' of Metropolitan Modernity, is similarly engaged with the city as the space of agitational class conflict. Brazeau examines Sean O'Casey's Dublin trilogy, arguing that O'Casey, like Walter Benjamin, came to the see the city as a porous, even tentatively formed environment, and also as the setting for class conflict. Tracing changes to the economic and political demographic of early twentieth-century Dublin, Brazeau argues that the city became, at this time, especially amenable to the forms of revolutionary nationalism that erupts in the Easter Rising of 1916. O'Casey was also a keen reader of the city as a gendered environment, and Brazeau considers this compelling aspect of O'Casey's writing as well. Brazeau looks at the city through the theoretical writings of Henri Lefebvre, Johnathan Raban, Walter Benjamin, and Michel Foucault to argue that O'Casey's Dublin trilogy is, while on a distinctly Irish urban setting, nevertheless a play about European metropolitanism. Taking the city's relationship to nationalism and national identities into his purview, in Two Toronto Novels and Lessons of Belonging: The Global City in Modern Canadian Literature, Myles Chilton looks at the city and its representation in the work of two contemporary Canadian writers. …

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