Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity

Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity explores the narrative formations of urbanity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within the framework of the “spatial turn,” contributors from disciplines ranging from geography and history to literary and media studies theorize narrative constructions of the city and cities, and analyze relevant examples from a variety of discourses, media, and cities. Subdivided into six sections, the book explores the interactions of city and text—as well as other media—and the conflicting narratives that arise in these interactions. Offering case studies that discuss specific aspects of the narrative construction of Berlin and London, the text also considers narratives of urban discontinuity and their theoretical implications. Ultimately, this volume captures the narratological, artistic, material, social, and performative possibilities inherent in spatial representations of the city.

1          Introduction: Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts

Rebekka Rohleder and Martin Kindermann

Part 1
The City and the Text/ the City as a Text

2          City Scripts / City Scapes. On the Intertextuality of Urban Experience

Andreas Mahler

3          (Urban) Sacred Places and Profane Spaces—Theological Topography in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land

Verena Keidel

Daria Baryshnikova

Part 2
Television Reading the City

5          “This America, man.” Narrating and Reading Urban Space in The Wire

Christopher Schliephake

6          Reading the City: ‘Mind Mapping’ in the BBC’s Sherlock

Janina Wierzoch

Part 3 Conflicting Narratives

7          Transcription: Addressing the Interactivity between Urban and Architectural Spaces and their Use

Klaske Maria Havik

8          Politics and the Production of Space: Downtown and Out with Rancière and Lefebvre

Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich

9          The People of New Jerusalem: Narratives of Social In- and Exclusion in Rotterdam after the Blitz of 1940

Stefan Couperus

10        Smart City Narratives and Narrating Smart Urbanism

Anke Strüver and Sybille Bauriedl

Part 4
Contesting the City I: Women on the Streets of London

11        Poetic Mobility and the Location of an Anglo-Jewish Self: Amy Levy’s and Elaine Feinstein’s Cityscapes

Martin Kindermann

12        Gender and the City: Virginia Woolf’s London between Promise of Freedom and Structural Confinement

Claudia Heuer

Part 5
Contesting the City II: Berlin, History and Memory

13        The City Stripped Bare of its Histories, Even: Crisis and Representation in two German Trümmerfilme of 1948

Daniel Jonah Wolpert

Joshua Parker

Part 6
Dis/Continuities

15        Finding Causes for Events: The City as Normative Narrative

Rebekka Rohleder

16        Private Topographies: Visions of Tokyo in Modern Japanese Literature

Gala Maria Follaco

17        Reading Against the Grain—Black Presence in Lower Manhattan, New York City

Tazalika M. te Reh

Martin Kindermann is an English teacher. Previously, he worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and was a Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. He has published on religious poetry in the 19^th and 20^th century, Anglo-Jewish and Anglo-Muslim Writing, and the construction of space in literature as well as questions of post-coloniality and interculturality.

Rebekka Rohleder is Research Assistant at the University of Flensburg, Germany. Previously, she worked at the University of Hamburg’s Department for English and American Studies. Her research interests include British Romanticism, literary space, and depictions of work in contemporary culture. In 2019, she published “A Different Earth”: Literary Space in Mary Shelley’s Novels.