Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity(Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies)

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.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts, Rebekka Rohleder and Martin Kindermann.- 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.- 4. Traveling Discourses: The Works of Pavel Ulitin (1918-1986) and the Problem of Narrative Alternatives, Daria Baryshnikova.- 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.- 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.- 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.- 13. The City Stripped Bare of its Histories, Even: Crisis and Representation in two German Trümmerfilme of 1948, Daniel Jonah Wolpert.- 14. “A ‘bridgehead’ in the visible domain”: Chloe Aridjis’s, J.S. Marcus’s and Theodore Sedgwick Fay’s Tales of Berlin, Joshua Parker.- 15. Finding Causes for Events: The City as Normative Narrative, Rebekka Rohleder.- 16. Private Topographies: Visions of Tōkyō in Modern Japanese Literature, Gala Maria Follaco.- 17. Reading Against the Grain—Black Presence in Lower Manhattan, New York City, Tazalika M. te Reh.

About the Author :
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 19th and 20th 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.