1st Edition
City Images Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy and Film
By Mary Ann Caws
Copyright 1991
284 Pages
by
Routledge
292 Pages
by
Routledge
292 Pages
by
Routledge
Also available as eBook on:
First Published in 1991. Knowing any real city, and still more so, knowing what it is to know a city, may be as much about passive as about active experience. What we read in the field-that field of the city in all its bizarre mixture of culture and nature-is bound to determine, to some non-fictional extent, what we know of it, what we imagine it could be, what we fear it may be, or become. These... Read more
INTRODUCTION The City on Our Mind 1. DISCOURSE AND THE CITY The City: Some Classical Moments; Discourse, Polis, Finiteness, Perfection 2. COGNITIVE MAPPING: LABYRINTHS, LIBRARIES AND CROSSROADS The Labyrinth as Sign of City, Text, and Thought; The Labyrinth and the Library en abyme: Eco, Borges, Dickens; On City Streets and Narrative Logic 3. CHARACTER AND POETRY IN THE CITY From Topos to Anthropoid: The City as Character in Twentieth-Century Texts; The Cosmopolis of Poetics: Urban World, Uncertain Poetry; 4. THE CITY AS LANDSCAPE Virginia Woolf's London and the Feminist Revision of Modernism; Cingria and His Cities; The New York Writer and His Landscapes 5. NEW YORK TO PARIS The Breakup of the City and the Breakdown of Narrative: Baudelaire's Le Cygne and James Merrill's Urban Convalescence; From Memory Lane to Memory Boulevard: Paris Change! Paris, Baudelaire and Benjamin: The Poetics of Urban Violence; Framing the City: Two Parisian Windows 6. CLAIMS ON THE CITY City, Swain and Subtext in Blake's Songs; Things Can't Go on Like This: A Beggar's Itinerary 7. CONTEMPORARY CITIES: TRAFFICKING AND FILMING Trafficking in Philosophy: Lines of Force in the City-Text; City/Cinema/Dream 8. ENACTMENT AND LASTNESS; The Last Manifesto
Biography
Mary Ann Caws Graduate School City University of New York
