Urban Fiction Research Articles

Cy–Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges

Book Review| December 01 2011 Cy–Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges Herbrechter, Stefan; Callus, Ivan, eds. Cy–Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2009. 224 pp. Cloth $55.00. Héctor Hoyos Héctor Hoyos Stanford University Héctor Hoyos is an assistant professor of Latin American Literature and Culture in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University. He holds a PhD and an MA in romance studies from Cornell University. He was born in Bogotá, where he studied philosophy and literature at the Universidad de los Andes. He is currently preparing two book manuscripts, entitled “Beyond Bolaño: The Global Latin American Novel” and “El deber de la travesura: César Aira y la crítica cultural.” His research areas include visual culture and critical theory, as well as comparative and philosophical approaches to literature. His articles on García Márquez, Roberto Bolaño, urban fiction, and the late thought of Ludwig Wittgenstein have appeared in or are forthcoming from several venues, among them Third Text, Chasqui, and Revista Iberoamericana. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2011) 48 (4): 593–596. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.4.0593 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Héctor Hoyos; Cy–Borges: Memories of the Posthuman in the Work of Jorge Luis Borges. Comparative Literature Studies 1 December 2011; 48 (4): 593–596. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.48.4.0593 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressComparative Literature Studies Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2011 by The Pennsylvania State University. All rights reserved.2011The Pennsylvania State University Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Street lives, roof lives: Literary transformations of Arab urban spaces after Mahfouz

Drawing on recent studies of new cosmopolitanisms, this paper explores Arab writers’ use of space as a literary category in post-Mahfouz Arab urban fiction. By tracing conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism in the Middle East and by identifying and comparing the literary transformations of urban social experiences in Ghada Samman’s Beirut ’75 (1995), Muhammad Kamil al-Khatib’s Just Like a River (1984) and Alaa al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (2004), and the writers’ attempts to overcome the ambiguous binary between national and cosmopolitan perspectives, this article aims to situate the novels’ main themes of urban violence, class and gender inequality, consumerism and social exclusion within a broader geopolitical framework.

Urban fictions: a critical reflection on locative art and performative geographies

This article critically examines the mapmaking practices of locative art and explores its potential to produce alternative maps that respond to the spatial and social multiplicity of our urban fabric. Starting from a critique of traditional cartographic practice and how locative art shares its Cartesian anchorage and technological lenses, we investigate the conceptual challenges, methodological issues and technological constraints related to entangling geographic locations and social dynamics. We introduce our locative artworks Urban Fiction (2007) and Urban Fiction 2.0 (2011) that engage participants in corporeal negotiations of urban spaces to generate dynamic, fictional maps. Reflecting on these works allows us to examine the potential of locative media against a backdrop of technological advances and co-evolving social practices. Situated within post-colonial and feminist perspectives, we develop the notion of a ‘performative geography’ based on a generative mapping approach that understands maps as a dynamic process, rather than a fixed representation.

From Egan To Reynolds

The essay examines changing perspectives on the city in England and France, during a time of urban expansion, with reference to four seminal works of literature. Life in London (1821) was a serial by Pierce Egan Sr., with coloured etchings by George and Robert Cruikshank. It was the first work to portray London topography, its peoples and their occupations, as an organic whole, a city in which every part had its own fascination. Using the narrative device of a lively man about town introducing a countryman to city life, it was much imitated, often dramatized, and it set the stage for the Victorian urban novel. First published in France, the Memoirs (1828–29) of Eugène Francois Vidocq was popular on both sides of the channel. With its view of city streets as a labyrinth of crime, it fostered both the detective story and the ‘Mysteries’ genre of urban fiction, which is examined here with reference to works by Eugene Sue and G. W. M. Reynolds.

Critical Readings: African American Girls and Urban Fiction

The goal of this writing is to introduce the reader to the urban fiction genre, explore why adolescent African American girls may be engaging with novels from the genre, and how teachers may be able to use texts from the genre to increase literacy skills.إن هدف هذه الورقة أن يعرّف القارئ على نوع من الأدب وهو الأدب الخيالي المدني وتستكشف سبب المراهقات الإفريقيات قد يهتممن بالروايات من هذا النوع وكيف قد يستطيع المعلمون أن يستخدموا النصوص من هذا النوع لتحسين مهارات معرفة القراءة والكتابة.本文旨在向读者介绍城市小说这种体裁，探讨为何美国非洲裔青少年女孩会投入阅读这种体裁的小说，以及探讨教师如何可以利用这种体裁的文本来提高学生的读写能力。Ce texte a pour but de présenter au lecteur la fiction urbaine en tant que genre, d'examiner pourquoi les adolescentes afro‐américaines peuvent s'investir dans les romans à partir de ce genre, et comment les professeurs peuvent utiliser les textes de ce genre pour améliorer les compétences en littératie.Цель статьи – познакомить читателей с таким жанром литературы, как городская беллетристика, проанализировать, почему девочки‐подростки афро‐американского происхождения увлекаются такими романами и как учителя могут использовать подобные тексты, чтобы совершенствовать навыки грамотности у этих подростков.La meta de este ensayo es la de hacer conocer al lector el género novelesco urbano, explorar por qué las jóvenes africano americanas podrían estarse identificando con las novelas de dicho género, y cómo los maestros podrían usar dichos textos para mejorar las destrezas de lectura.

From the Editors

From the Editors Julie Pfeiffer (bio) I spent last summer traveling with a group of graduate students in England. Our focus was "The Landscape of British Children's Literature" and our discussions ranged from thinking about how our physical presence in the landscape changes the imaginative landscape we inhabit while reading to investigating how particular aspects of landscape—shores, islands, gardens, underground railways, etc.—act symbolically in texts. It is perhaps not surprising that I now read the essays gathered in this volume with issues of place and space very much on my mind and with an old saying of my mother's, "where you sit defines the view," on my tongue. These essays lead me to reflect on the ways our interpretations are shaped by where we sit: both our physical location and the beliefs to which we lay claim. Like the well-known image of the old hag who is also a beautiful lady, these essays reveal that what we see first isn't all there is to see; shifting our focus reveals double images of character, theory, or genre. The nine articles and Varia piece gathered in Children's Literature, 38 are a tribute to the flexibility of vision of their authors. I'm delighted to imagine the many readers of this volume—each sitting in a different place around the world—joined for the moment in the act of expanding their view of children's literature and the world it inhabits. The volume opens with Andrew Loman's essay, "The Sea Cook's Wife: Evocations of Slavery in Treasure Island," and his claim that, read in historical context, this novel "dissolv[es] meaningful moral distinctions between pirate and good British sailor." Loman's carefully crafted analysis of the historical context of Treasure Island identifies two divergent readings of the novel. From one perspective, it is an imperial romance, with an adventure plot that obscures the origins of the treasure and avoids "the moral stringency of realism." However, the novel's references to the slave trade shine a spotlight on the human cost of the treasure hoard. Treasure Island must thus also be read as "anti-imperial critique." John Hutton begins his essay with the apparent commonplace that words and pictures work together in texts. However, in "Walter Crane and the Decorative Illustration of Books" Hutton helps us to see that this notion does not originate in late twentieth-century literary criticism, [End Page vii] but was usefully explored by Walter Crane in the nineteenth century. Hutton finds that for Crane, "[l]ayout, rather than literary theory, became the organizing principle of his analytical approach," and that Crane's "printer's vocabulary" leads to complex texts that encourage multiple readings. We move next from Britain to the United States, and from discussions of currency and printing presses to the sticky subject of the hungry child. In "Gastronomic Utopias: The Legacy of Political Hunger in African American Lore," Susan Honeyman explicates the dangerous attraction of molasses to draw our attention to the use of food as an oppressive tool. Placed in the context of a variety of gastronomic utopias, Honeyman's discussion of the Brer Rabbit tales shows that "[t]he similarities between the cultures of hunger depicted in African American folklore and children's literature in general are striking, suggesting hunger as a common political theme for marginalized groups." But Brer Rabbit resists oppression even as he helps us identify it; he thus serves as a model of strategies for resisting the pull toward community when that community ignores the needs of its least powerful members. Eric Tribunella takes us from the rural communities of gastronomic utopias to the city. Tribunella begins with Baudelaire's notion of the flâneur and makes the convincing case in "Children's Literature and the Child Flâneur" that child protagonists of urban fiction are usefully understood in light of this tradition. Their critical gaze and sense of wonder allow the adults around them (including the authors and readers of their stories) to better cope with the trials of modernity. While the child flâneur may struggle with exposure (his or her success depends, as Baudelaire says, on "remain[ing] hidden...

Critiquing the city, envisioning the country: Shen Congwen’s urban fiction

The essay studies Shen Congwen’s urban fictions in the literary contexts of his native-soil fiction and contemporary urban fiction by the Shanghai school in modern Chinese literature. It argues that Shen Congwen’s urban and rural writings demonstrate a profound irony: his perception of the disappearing rural idyllic and his panoramic representation are achieved through a modern sensibility as well as his disenchantment with the city, while his urban imagining/representation betrays an agrarianist distrust of the city, part of an age-old anti-urban Confucian thinking. His ambivalent attitude towards modernity also betrays a sense of loss in terms of his historical position regarding how to understand fundamental changes of his time as epitomized by the city. Nevertheless, Shen’s urban fiction has registered the initial efforts in modern Chinese literature in coming to grips of the modern city as it was emerging from its traditional form to become the locus of modernity and site of fundamental socioeconomic and cultural transformation.

“Falling off” the Urban Map: Cartographic Divisions and Travel in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh

Employing the painterly forms of the diptych and the triptych to conceptualise the cartographic openness and dynamics of the city in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, this article examines the tri-sected urban histories and geographies as well as the warring urban fictions which inform the image of Bombay in the novel. It traces the significance of these fictions’ clash and of the protagonist’s travels across cartographic divides.

The urban palimpsest: Re‐presenting Sophiatown

Evoking the notion of urban topography as palimpsest, this article treats urban space as the parchment on which constructions of urban modernity – always already gendered – are inscribed and reinscribed. Focusing on Sophiatown, one of the most symbolically charged and contested urban spaces, and certainly the most iconic urban fiction, it engages with historical processes of erasure in order to explore representations of Sophiatown as an overwritten document whose past topographies linger as traces resistant to effacement, and which, instead, underpin or haunt the imprint of superimposing layers. Taking as my starting point Dorothy Driver’s exploration of the operations of “woman as ‘sign’” in Drum magazine, I extend her reading across various layers of the urban palimpsest as I trace the sedimentation of gender performances in the production of urban modernity, from Alan Paton and the “fabulous fifties” to post‐apartheid returns to and of Sophiatown in Marlene van Niekerk’s novel Triomf (1994) and the films Drum (2004) and Sophiatown: Surviving Apartheid (2003).

Scan and Deliver

Scan and Deliver

Rewriting Beijing: a spectacular city in Qiu Huadong's urban fiction†

The rise of urban fiction in Chinese literary writings of the 1990s is certainly an important phenomenon, closely related to rapid urbanization as well as changes in the literary zeitgeist. However, what distinguishes the urban fiction of the 1990s is the foregrounding of the city itself, in that the city has come to the central place to become the chief object of representation. This paper examines, through a reading of Qiu Huadong's novel, The City Chariot, the specific ways in which urban fiction and the modern city have come to interact, how the city has created exclusively urban experiences, and how these urban experiences, in their turn, complicate our understanding and representing of the city, and demand a new structure of representation as well as a new relationship to the city. Set against a new metropolitan backdrop, Qiu's novel concentrates on the anxiety and richness of contemporary urban experiences. However, what these new experiences have created are senses of randomness, of terrifying disconnectedness, and of a loss of history. In this perceptive vertigo, the city resists any neat representation; and its images are fragmented to become ‘an untotalizing totality’.

Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America (review)

Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America (review)

Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America

In the post-war era, American urban fiction was dominated by the imagery of containment. This book offers a critique of this familiar story, evident in the noir narratives of James M. Cain and in work by Ellison, Roth, Salinger, Percy, Capote and others.

Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America by Elizabeth A. Wheeler

448 Reviews attention to detail and substantive narrative analysis in Willa Cather's New York, which together with Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism provides a welcome reassessment of Cather and her texts. The Franciscan University James M. Decker Uncontained: Urban Fiction in Postwar America. By Elizabeth A. Wheeler. New Brunswick, NJ, and London: Rutgers University Press. 2001. x + 301 pp. $60 (pbk $22). ISBN 0-8135-2972-7 (pbk 0-8135-2973-5). There is no doubt about the dominant paradigm of American culture during the two decades following the Second World War: it was one of containment, ostensibly of world Communism in a foreign policy developed by George Kennan, and most pervasively in a climate of corporate control over popular tastes exercised by commercial publishers, filmstudios, and the producers of Broadway musicals. In 1995 Alan Nadel surveyed and analysed the phenomenon in Confinement Culture. Now, Elizabeth A. Wheeler presents the alternative to this paradigm, consisting of a series of acts in serious fiction,pulp fiction, and film noir that between 1944 and 1964 strove to break out of cultural containment. Some of Wheeler's texts are new to scholarship (such as Ann Bannon's lesbian pulp novels published between 1957 and 1962), and others have received attention from critics mainly as precursors of late-1960s innovative fiction (such as Charles Wright's The Messenger (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1963)) or of womanist multiculturalism from the 1980s (e.g. Paule Marshall's Brown Girl, Brownstones (New York: Feminist Press, 1959)). Of course there are the major works everyone has known all along from J.D. Salinger's The Catcherin theRye (Boston: Little Brown, 1951) to Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959). However, from start to finish,Wheeler's study is characterized by a thorough originality of approach. To Nadel's consideration of confinement she adds the important matters of racial segregation and traumatic memory, combining the two to show how 'Postwar fiction transfersdifficultmemories from the individual to the urban landscape' (p. 1). Writers others have read as precursors Wheeler studies in their own right,as novelists capable of 'imagining home in differentsites' (p. 16). Women, especially those who engage stereotypes directly by writing as housewives (notably Grace Paley), refute the conventional wisdom of the times that opposition to the culture of confinement remains the privilege of lone males in the big, violent city (the province of Norman Mailer's hipster and William S. Burroughs's partakers of the naked lunch). How interesting it is to see Marshall and Roth considered together (perhaps for the firsttime), as are Sylvia Plath and Charles Wright (surely for the firsttime), as writers and their characters from differentsides of the Hudson River and at opposite ends of Central Park who can 'speak to each other' (p. 178) in the critical dialogue Wheeler conducts. However, it is not that the critic wishes to tell a prettystory. 'Throughout the works analyzed here,' she concludes, 'violence sinks beneath the smooth surface of postwar prosperity, leaving mere traces behind' (p. 261). In addition to trauma, however, the post-war city provides a new space for freedom, joy, and the enrichment of multiculturalism . Throughout the decades preceding the next great war, the one in Vietnam, there were 'liberating counterstories' (p. 261) that not simply foresaw the countercultural revolution of the mid- to later 1960s but showed how what was to come need not have justified itself as something 'counter' to a truly American life. It was the culture of containment, Wheeler shows, that was a perversion ofthe American spirit, inasmuch as that spirit is expressed by common, everyday people. Most helpful is Wheeler's own commitment to a method that offershope for literary criticism itself. MLR, 98.2, 2003 449 'By emphasizing the ways Cold War logic shuts down diversity of thought,' she fears, 'studies of containment culture can end up reproducing the containment culture.' Her antidote? 'By placing wildly disparate texts together, it becomes possible to see how segregation looks from both sides of the wall?and this to detect movements beyond containment' (p. 267). University of Northern Iowa Jerome Klinkowitz In Cold Fear: 'The Catcher in the Rye'y Censorship, Controversies...

Tayyib Rah Farjik Shighli (OK, I'll Show You My Work)

In 1997, during the months of July and August, we presented at the Arab World Institute in Paris an exhibition of photographic installations, Beirut : Urban Fictions. In July 2000, we were asked by Jalal Toufic to write an article on our installation works, in specific Wonder Beirut , 1998. But three years have already passed since Beirut : Urban Fictions. We have tried to write this text in various forms: analysis, inquiry, documents, the visitors' book of the exhibition, false documents, review of the press, retroactive analysis of our work . . . After a month of attempts it's a failure: the text is either too descriptive, or too analytical, or too abstract, or too removed from our current preoccupations or by all means interesting but incapable of implicating the audience who had not seen the exhibition. deadline is approaching; the writer's bloc is intensifying. It is then that we remembered Pierre Menard. Pierre is a writer, a fan of Cervantes' Don Quixote , of which he wrote anew, in a version absolutely respectful of the original, chapters IX and XXXVIII of the first part, as well as a fragment of chapter XXII. He did not want to compose another Quixote which is easy but the Quixote itself. We have met this amateur of cinema and photography at the exhibition Beirut: Urban Fictions , where he was photographing the last installation, The Circle of Confusion: a large, 4m x 3m photograph representing an aerial view of Beirut that we had cut into 3800 fragments and stuck to a mirror. visitors were invited to

Contemporary black British Urban fiction: A ‘Ghetto perspective'?

(2002). Contemporary black British Urban fiction: A ‘Ghetto perspective'? Wasafiri: Vol. 17, No. 36, pp. 18-22.

Practicing Utopia: Sustaining Cities

What are the possibilities for an art of urban engagement which takes a position on issues such as democracy, power, social justice and sustainability? And what does this have to do with planning, as we know it? These are the questions which frame this paper, in the context of a view of planning as an always unfinished social project. In order to liberate ourselves to think differently about how we might practice utopia as urban activists, I describe a new planning imagination, a dialectical imagination, and its actually existing practices. Among other things, such an imagination requires an expanded, more communicative conception of planning, and a more emotionally rich language available to its practitioners. This is not urban science fiction but true stories from various cities. What these stories suggest is that more and more of our work, if we want to work towards sustaining cities, will be bound up with organizing hope, negotiating fears, and mediating memories.

Bleak Houses and Secret Cities: Alternative Communities in Young Adult Fiction.

This essay examines novels in which children or teens in an urban environment, left on their own for a variety of reasons (such as poverty, war, plague, nuclear disaster, or technological breakdown), join together to form a community that explores alternative versions of home and family. The urban survival novel, to distinguish it from the more popular wilderness survival story, encompasses a wide variety of genres, including fantasy, satire, science fiction, social realism, and historical fiction. These novels involve dramatic shifts of perspective—inside/outside, above/below, before/after—which challenge protagonists (and readers) to see the world around them differently and to confront other points of view. The 1970s ushered in a wave of urban survival fiction that has continued to the present; I speculate on why these survival scenarios have proved so compelling for young adult readers.

Uncontained: urban fiction in postwar America

Uncontained: urban fiction in postwar America

"Unhuman Humanity": Bodies of the Urban Poor and the Collapse of Realist Legibility

Recently, several scholars of late nineteenth-century urban fiction, photography, and social science discourse have stressed the complicity of these cultural forms with emerging modes of social discipline. In particular, critics have argued that the desire to represent the lives of socially subordinate populations-tenement dwellers, immigrants, vagrants-in novels, photographs, and scientific studies converged with governmental and private-sector reform and social service programs to establish an extensive, tightly-woven web of surveillance through which the poor and disenfranchised were analyzed, regulated, and policed. Literary historian June Howard contends, for example, that naturalist writing reinforced Progressive-era structures of social dominance in which the poor become objects of professional-managerial class scrutiny. Howard argues that naturalism is characterized by an organizing dichotomy between privileged, autonomous narrator, with whom the reader is aligned, and degraded inhabitant of deterministic world. Rather than an self-governing individual, the is the central subject in spectacle of determinism that confirms the of the narrator's gaze and the moral authority and freedom of the readers. [T]he menacing and vulnerable Other-the brute-is incapable of acting as self-conscious, purposeful agent[;] he can only be observed and analyzed by such an agent (104). However, although the spectator describes and explains the brute, he (rarely she) retains his autonomy the deterministic environment the inhabits; while explore determinism, we never submerged in it and ourselves become the brute (104). Ultimately, Howard argues, the narrator/brute split anticipates the Progressive movement, which placed reform in the hands of small cadre of ostensibly enlightened, nonpartisan experts. It is very short step, Howard contends, from naturalism's gesture of control to progressivism's, the sympathy and good intentions of the naturalist spectator to the altruistic and ultimately authoritarian benevolence of the progressive reformer (131). Along similar lines, Mark Seltzer has recently argued that realism's drive to render the social world legible operates as form of cultural surveillance. Seltzer contends that realism's and naturalism's diverse registers are coordinated within single technology of regulation (Statistical 84), a flexible and totalizing machine of power (Bodies 44). [T]he realist vision of the urban underworld, Seltzer contends, involves disciplinary relation between seeing