Reviewed by: Urban Verbs: Arts and Discourses of American Cities Cheryl B. Torsney Kevin R. McNamara. Urban Verbs: Arts and Discourses of American Cities. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. 310 pp. $39.50. Urban Verbs, named for a 1980s Washington, D.C., new wave band, is the kind of wide-ranging interdisciplinary study most of us wish we had the wherewithal to manage. By mating “abstract” theory and “tangible” architecture to establish a grammar of urbanism for examining the aesthetics of urban living, Urban Verbs does a fine job of demonstrating how art interacts with daily life. Such a strategy answers the recent calls from both the MLA and from the general public to make our scholarship relevant. McNamara does so brilliantly, employing recent theory and scholarship in a host of fields—urban studies, architecture, history, literature. Because the official Library of Congress publication data for Urban Verbs neglects to mention “literature” at all, listing it as a study of “Cities and towns in art,” “Arts, American,” and “Arts, Modern—20th Century—United States,” this work may escape the eyes of those who might find it most useful, enlightening, even ground-breaking: teachers and scholars of American literature. These are the readers most likely to benefit from McNamara’s cogent and nuanced arguments as well as from his superb notes and bibliography. McNamara reads closely—and he is a careful and creative explicator, attentive to both language and image—three pairs of texts representing three defining moments in American urban history: the rise of the urban environment in Henry James’s The American Scene and Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie; the defining of the modernist moment in Hugh Ferriss’s The Metropolis of Tomorrow and William Carlos Williams’s Paterson; and the apotheosis of the modernist city in The Naked City and a group of architectural projects and essays by Venturi and Scott Brown. Readers of The Henry James Review will be most interested in McNamara’s first chapter, which discusses one of the current textual darlings of James studies, [End Page 206] The American Scene. This discussion of James anchors the rest of the study, offering a historical standard by which to measure the progress of urbanism. McNamara argues that James constructed two different cities in The American Scene, the Anglo-ethnic and the immigrant; that these two domains reinscribed European sexual and gender hierarchies while simultaneously constructing new spaces, such as hotels and country clubs, which restructured those hierarchies; that James’s ambivalence about immigrants’ use of urban space led him to prefer that physical margins be maintained to separate cultures from each other. In this chapter McNamara usefully historicizes tenement design as well as Central Park, cafe culture, and the architecture of the Waldorf-Astoria. James, McNamara’s representative of urban possibility, presides over the rest of Urban Verbs. In the chapter on Hugh Ferriss’s The Metropolis of Tomorrow (1929), a portfolio of sketches of recent American buildings and discussion of future architectural trends, Jamesian possibility represented by Central Park is negated, as Ferriss’s urban vision doesn’t allow for leisure. In his chapter on Williams’s Paterson, Dr. Paterson is compared to James’s restless analyst in Central Park. The chapter on The Naked City invokes James’s imagery of fire escapes as “a spaciously organized cage” to bring home how a concern with immigration and containment of “non-American hordes” resurfaces during the early years of the Cold War. Following a chapter on the California pop architecture of Venturi and Scott Brown, the conclusion brings the discussion full-circle, back to James: “James’s travelogue is eloquent in its proof (despite itself at times) that the ‘American’ changes along with the immigrant” (246). This study recommends itself as a shining example of what scholarship can do to enlighten an educated populace about the world in which they live. It asserts that If cities are geographic pockets of concentrated difference, it is incumbent upon all citizens not to withdraw from life in common by practicing a limiting identity politics or becoming preoccupied with inner space, but to find common ground on which to rebuild cities as physical, political, and ethical spaces shared by different communities...