Exploring the Spatiality of the City

across Cultural Texts: Narrating

Spaces, Reading Urbanity Martin
Kindermann
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/exploring-the-spatiality-of-the-city-across-cultural-text
s-narrating-spaces-reading-urbanity-martin-kindermann/
More products digital (pdf, epub, mobi) instant
download maybe you interests ...

The Cultural Sociology of Reading: The Meanings of

Reading and Books Across the World María Angélica
Thumala Olave

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-cultural-sociology-of-reading-
the-meanings-of-reading-and-books-across-the-world-maria-
angelica-thumala-olave/

The Climate City 1st Edition Martin Powell

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-climate-city-1st-edition-
martin-powell/

Mind Reading as a Cultural Practice Laurens Schlicht

https://ebookmass.com/product/mind-reading-as-a-cultural-
practice-laurens-schlicht/

Madness in the City of Magnificent Intentions: A

History of Race and Mental Illness in the Nation's
Capital Martin Summers

https://ebookmass.com/product/madness-in-the-city-of-magnificent-
intentions-a-history-of-race-and-mental-illness-in-the-nations-
capital-martin-summers/
City Living: How Urban Spaces and Urban Dwellers Make
One Another Quill R. Kukla

https://ebookmass.com/product/city-living-how-urban-spaces-and-
urban-dwellers-make-one-another-quill-r-kukla/

Orality, Textuality, and the Homeric Epics: An

Interdisciplinary Study of Oral Texts, Dictated Texts,
and Wild Texts Jonathan L Ready

https://ebookmass.com/product/orality-textuality-and-the-homeric-
epics-an-interdisciplinary-study-of-oral-texts-dictated-texts-
and-wild-texts-jonathan-l-ready/

Exploring Ibero-American Youth Cultures in the 21st

Century: Creativity, Resistance and Transgression in
the City 1st Edition Ricardo Campos

https://ebookmass.com/product/exploring-ibero-american-youth-
cultures-in-the-21st-century-creativity-resistance-and-
transgression-in-the-city-1st-edition-ricardo-campos/

Pagan Inscriptions, Christian Viewers. The Afterlives

of Temples and Their Texts in the Late Antique Eastern
Mediterranean (Cultures of Reading in the Ancient
Mediterranean) 1st Edition Anna M. Sitz
https://ebookmass.com/product/pagan-inscriptions-christian-
viewers-the-afterlives-of-temples-and-their-texts-in-the-late-
antique-eastern-mediterranean-cultures-of-reading-in-the-ancient-
mediterranean-1st-edition-anna-m-sitz/

The Measure of Malice Martin Edwards

https://ebookmass.com/product/the-measure-of-malice-martin-
edwards/
GEOCRITICISM AND SPATIAL LITERARY STUDIES

Exploring the Spatiality

of the City across
Cultural Texts
Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity
Edited by
Martin Kindermann
Rebekka Rohleder
Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

Series Editor
Robert T. Tally Jr.
Texas State University
San Marcos, TX, USA
Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is a new book series focusing
on the dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. The spatial
turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an explosion of
innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship in recent years, and geocriticism,
broadly conceived, has been among the more promising developments in
spatially oriented literary studies. Whether focused on literary geography,
cartography, geopoetics, or the spatial humanities more generally, geocrit-
ical approaches enable readers to reflect upon the representation of space
and place, both in imaginary universes and in those zones where fiction
meets reality. Titles in the series include both monographs and collections
of essays devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in associ-
ation with other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theo-
retical traditions, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies
series disclose, analyze, and explore the significance of space, place, and
mapping in literature and in the world.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15002
Martin Kindermann · Rebekka Rohleder
Editors

Exploring
the Spatiality
of the City
across Cultural Texts
Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity
Editors
Martin Kindermann Rebekka Rohleder
Joseph Carlebach School Hamburg University of Flensburg (EUF)
Hamburg, Germany Flensburg, Germany

Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies

ISBN 978-3-030-55268-8 ISBN 978-3-030-55269-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2020
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights
of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology
now known or hereafter developed.
The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc.
in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such
names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for
general use.
The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa-
tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither
the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with
respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been
made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps
and institutional affiliations.

Cover illustration: William C.Y. Chu/gettyimages

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
 Series Editor’s Preface

The spatial turn in the humanities and social sciences has occasioned an
explosion of innovative, multidisciplinary scholarship. Spatially oriented
literary studies, whether operating under the banner of literary geog-
raphy, literary cartography, geophilosophy, geopoetics, geocriticism, or
the spatial humanities more generally, have helped to reframe or to trans-
form contemporary criticism by focusing attention, in various ways, on the
dynamic relations among space, place, and literature. Reflecting upon the
representation of space and place, whether in the real world, in imaginary
universes, or in those hybrid zones where fiction meets reality, scholars
and critics working in spatial literary studies are helping to reorient literary
criticism, history, and theory. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies is
a book series presenting new research in this burgeoning field of inquiry.
In exploring such matters as the representation of place in literary
works, the relations between literature and geography, the historical trans-
formation of literary and cartographic practices, and the role of space in
critical theory, among many others, geocriticism and spatial literary studies
have also developed interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary methods and
practices, frequently making productive connections to architecture, art
history, geography, history, philosophy, politics, social theory, and urban
studies, to name but a few. Spatial criticism is not limited to the spaces of
the so-called real world, and it sometimes calls into question any too facile
distinction between real and imaginary places, as it frequently investigates
what Edward Soja has referred to as the “real-and-imagined” places we

v
vi SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE

experience in literature as in life. Indeed, although a great deal of impor-

tant research has been devoted to the literary representation of certain
identifiable and well-known places (e.g., Dickens’s London, Baudelaire’s
Paris, or Joyce’s Dublin), spatial critics have also explored the other-
worldly spaces of literature, such as those to be found in myth, fantasy,
science fiction, video games, and cyberspace. Similarly, such criticism is
interested in the relationship between spatiality and such different media
or genres as film or television, music, comics, computer programs, and
other forms that may supplement, compete with, and potentially prob-
lematize literary representation. Titles in the Geocriticism and Spatial
Literary Studies series include both monographs and collections of essays
devoted to literary criticism, theory, and history, often in association with
other arts and sciences. Drawing on diverse critical and theoretical tradi-
tions, books in the series reveal, analyze, and explore the significance of
space, place, and mapping in literature and the world.
The concepts, practices, or theories implied by the title of this series are
to be understood expansively. Although geocriticism and spatial literary
studies represent a relatively new area of critical and scholarly investiga-
tion, the historical roots of spatial criticism extend well beyond the recent
past, informing present and future work. Thanks to a growing critical
awareness of spatiality, innovative research into the literary geography
of real and imaginary places has helped to shape historical and cultural
studies in ancient, medieval, early modern, and modernist literature, while
a discourse of spatiality undergirds much of what is still understood as
the postmodern condition. The suppression of distance by modern tech-
nology, transportation, and telecommunications has only enhanced the
sense of place, and of displacement, in the age of globalization. Spatial
criticism examines literary representations not only of places themselves,
but of the experience of place and displacement, while exploring the inter-
relations between lived experience and a more abstract or unrepresentable
spatial network that subtly or directly shapes it. In sum, the work being
done in geocriticism and spatial literary studies, broadly conceived, is
diverse and far-reaching. Each volume in this series takes seriously the
mutually impressive effects of space or place and artistic representation,
particularly as these effects manifest themselves in works of literature. By
bringing the spatial and geographical concerns to bear on their scholar-
ship, books in the Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series seek
to make possible different ways of seeing literary and cultural texts, to
pose novel questions for criticism and theory, and to offer alternative
 SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE vii

approaches to literary and cultural studies. In short, the series aims to

open up new spaces for critical inquiry.

San Marcos, USA Robert T. Tally Jr.

 Acknowledgments

It is with particular pleasure that the editors take the opportunity of

acknowledging all the collective effort which went into making this
project possible. We wish to thank everyone who helped make our
“Narrating Spaces—Reading Urbanity” conference at the University of
Hamburg a success back in September 2012, as well as everyone who
subsequently contributed ideas and advice during the development of this
volume. As usual in such cases, we have many people to thank, and some
of them need to be singled out in particular. We sincerely hope we have
not forgotten anyone who should be mentioned by name. Many thanks,
first of all, to all original conference participants, including Alina Bothe,
Anke Kell, Maciej Kowalewski, and Julia Leyda, who did not contribute
to this book, but whose conference papers and subsequent input, along
with the contributions of all other participants, enriched our discussion of
the city, which ultimately led to this volume. Many thanks, next, to Prof.
Dr. Susanne Rupp, Prof. Dr. Johann Schmidt, and Prof. Dr. Ute Berns
for taking an interest in our project at various stages of its development.
Many thanks also to two of our own contributors, Janina Wierzoch and
Dennis Büscher–Ulbrich, for special assistance. And last but definitely not
least we wish to thank Rachel Jacobe at Palgrave for promptly, patiently,
and helpfully answering all our queries during the process of finalizing the
manuscript.

ix
 Contents

1 Introduction: Exploring the Spatiality of the City

Across Cultural Texts 1
Rebekka Rohleder and Martin Kindermann

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

2 City Scripts/City Scapes: On the Intertextuality

of Urban Experience 25
Andreas Mahler

3 (Urban) Sacred Places and Profane

Spaces—Theological Topography in T. S.
Eliot’s The Waste Land 45
Verena Keidel

4 Traveling Discourses: The Works of Pavel Ulitin

(1918–1986) and the Problem of Narrative
Alternatives 65
Daria Baryshnikova

xi
xii CONTENTS

Part II Television Reading the City

5 “This America, Man.” Narrating and Reading Urban

Space in The Wire 85
Christopher Schliephake

6 Reading the City: “Mind Mapping” in Sherlock 101

Janina Wierzoch

Part III Conflicting Narratives

7 Transcription: Addressing the Interactivity Between

Urban and Architectural Spaces and Their Use 121
Klaske Maria Havik

8 Politics and the Production of Space: Downtown

and Out with Rancière and Lefebvre 141
Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich

9 The People of New Jerusalem: Narratives of Social In-

and Exclusion in Rotterdam After the Blitz of 1940 167
Stefan Couperus

10 Smart City Narratives and Narrating Smart Urbanism 185

Anke Strüver and Sybille Bauriedl

Part IV 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 207
Martin Kindermann
 CONTENTS xiii

12 Gender and the City: Virginia Woolf’s London

Between Promise of Freedom and Structural
Confinement 225
Claudia Heuer

Part V 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 247
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 263
Joshua Parker

Part VI Dis/Continuities

15 Finding Causes for Events: The City as Normative

Narrative 283
Rebekka Rohleder

16 Private Topographies: Visions of Tōkyō in Modern

Japanese Literature 301
Gala Maria Follaco

17 Reading Against the Grain: Black Presence in Lower

Manhattan, New York City 321
Tazalika M. te Reh

Index 335
 Notes on Contributors

Daria Baryshnikova currently works on her Ph.D. Thesis at Bielefeld

University (Germany) investigating the specificity of cut-up-narratives
within different cultural contexts. Her focus is on the representation of
mind and mind processes in cut-up-literature. She graduated from the
Russian State University for the Humanities (Moscow). In 2005, she
defended her candidate dissertation in the field of history of culture.
Since then, she has worked as a lecturer at the Russian State University
for the Humanities and as a research assistant at the National Center for
Contemporary Arts (Moscow).
Sybille Bauriedl is Professor of Integrative Geography at the European
University of Flensburg, Germany. She has been researching and teaching
sustainable urban development, resource conflicts, and gender justice
since the 1990s. Current research projects deal with decentralized energy
transition, coloniality in port cities, mobility transition in European cities,
and the geographical dimension of climate justice. See also her blog
https://klimadebatte.wordpress.com.
Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich is Assistant Professor of American Cultural
Studies at the University of Kiel, Germany. He has published articles
and book chapters on urban cultural studies, Marxist crisis theory, crit-
ical race studies, ideology critique, avant-garde poetry, zombie films, and
black music.

xv
xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Stefan Couperus is Associate Professor of European Politics and Society

at the University of Groningen, Netherlands. He has worked on the
history of urban governance, planning, and social order in Western
Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He co-edited (with
H. Kaal) (Re)Constructing Communities in Europe, 1918–1968 (Rout-
ledge, 2017) and he has published on urban governance practices, postwar
reconstruction, community building, and social marginalization in jour-
nals such as Urban History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of Modern
European History and International Journal for History, Culture and
Modernity.
Gala Maria Follaco is Assistant Professor of Japanese Studies at “L’Ori-
entale” University of Naples (Italy). She has translated the works of several
Japanese writers and published articles on urban representation in modern
and contemporary Japanese literature. Her monograph, A Sense of the
City. Modes of Urban Representation in the Works of Nagai Kafū (Brill,
2017), examines Nagai Kafū’s (1879–1959) literary construction of urban
spatialities from the late 1890s to the late 1930s.
Klaske Maria Havik is Acting Professor of Methods & Analysis and
Head of Research of the Department of Architecture at TU Delft,
Netherlands. Her book Urban Literacy. Reading and Writing Architec-
ture (Rotterdam: Nai010, 2014), based on her Ph.D., proposes a literary
approach to architecture and urbanism. Other publications include Writ-
ingplace. Investigations in Architecture and Literature (2016), “Writing
Atmospheres,” in Jonathan Charley (ed), Routlegde Companion to Archi-
tecture and Literature (London: Routledge, 2018) and Architectural Posi-
tions: Architecture, Modernity and the Public Sphere (2009). Havik is
editor of the Writingplace Journal for Architecture & Literature, and
Action Chair of the EU Cost network Writing Urban Places.
Claudia Heuer is a freelance translator, writer, and university lecturer.
She has taught at the University of Hamburg and Leuphana University
Lüneburg (Germany). She works in popular fiction, nonfiction, and tele-
vision, teaches twentieth-century and contemporary literature and culture
as well as academic and creative writing. She has already published in all
of these fields, but her current academic work focusses on contemporary
issues of identity formation (gendered identites, human-animal studies,
cyborg theory).
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xvii

Verena Keidel has completed her doctoral thesis at Hamburg University

on the “sacred” and its cultural dynamics in British and Irish Modernist
Drama. She has published on the intersection of literature and religion,
modernist and contemporary drama as well as Shakespeare on the German
Stage. Currently, she works as a research associate at Leuphana University
Lüneburg (Germany) and is preparing her thesis for publication.
Martin Kindermann studied English literature, North American, and
Russian literature at the University of Hamburg. He holds a Ph.D. in
English literature; in his dissertation he analyzed the construction of space
and the constitution of memory in contemporary Anglo-Jewish novels.
From 2014 to 2016 he was a postdoc research fellow at the Friedrich
Schlegel Graduate School for Literary Studies at the Free University of
Berlin. Until recently he held the position of a research assistant at the
University of Hamburg, Germany. Kindermann has published on Anglo-
Jewish and Anglo-Muslim Writing as well as questions of postcoloniality,
and interculturality.
Andreas Mahler is Professor of English Literature and Literary System-
atics at Freie Universität Berlin (Germany).
Joshua Parker is an Associate Professor of English and American studies
at the University of Salzburg (Austria), with interests in place and space
in American literature, transatlantic relations, and narrative theory. His
books include Metamorphosis and Place, Austria and America: Cross-
Cultural Encounters 1865–1933, Austria and America: 20th-Century
Cross-Cultural Encounters and Tales of Berlin in American Literature up
to the 21st Century.
Rebekka Rohleder is currently a Research Assistant at Europa-
Universität Flensburg, Germany. She received her Ph.D. at FU Berlin in
2017, and her Ph.D. thesis has been published in book form in 2019,
under the title “A Different Earth”: Literary Space in Mary Shelley’s
Novels. She has previously worked as a research assistant at the Depart-
ment for English and American Studies of the University of Hamburg.
She has also taught at Leuphana University of Lüneburg. Her research
interests include British Romanticism, in particular Mary Shelley and her
circle; literary space, and contemporary depictions of work across media.
Christopher Schliephake (*1985) is Senior Lecturer in Ancient History
at the University of Augsburg (Germany). He holds a Ph.D. in both
xviii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

American Studies (2013) and Ancient History (2018). His scholarship

and teaching focus on the environmental history of antiquity, ecocriticism,
urban studies, cultural memory studies, and classical reception studies.
Recent essays appear or will soon appear in Ecozon@, American Studies,
and Anglia. Christopher’s first book, Urban Ecologies: City Space, Mate-
rial Agency, and Environmental Politics in Contemporary Culture (2015)
is available from Lexington Books. He is also the editor of Ecocriti-
cism, Ecology, and the Cultures of Antiquity (2017, also available from
Lexington Books).
Anke Strüver is a professor of human geography with a focus on urban
studies at the Karl–Franzens University Graz (Austria) since fall 2018.
In 2004 she completed her Ph.D. at the University of Nijmegen (NL)
on the sociocultural production of cross-border spaces and their effects
on everyday practices. She became a professor of social geography at
the University of Hamburg in 2010. Her research focuses on embodied
human–environment relations in the city, especially along the themes of
health, food, and active mobility, as well as digitalization and sustainable
collaboration.
Tazalika M. te Reh is an architect and academic whose research and
teaching examines the relationship between architecture, space, and the
racial, with a focus on the built environment. At the Salzburg Global
Citizenship Alliance, Austria, she is a faculty member and a Fellow of the
Salzburg Global Seminar. Before finalizing her Ph.D. thesis in cultural
studies at TU Dortmund University, Tazalika earned degrees from the
Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and the Universities of Applied Sciences in
Cologne and Bochum. In 2014, she was a visiting researcher at Columbia
University and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New
York City.
Janina Wierzoch, M.A., has recently finished her Ph.D. thesis
“Home/Fronts” on representations of contemporary war in British
literature, drama, and film at the University of Hamburg, Germany. She
has been working as a research assistant at the university’s department for
English and American studies and as a lecturer at Leuphana University,
Lüneburg. With a degree in British literature and culture, media studies
and German literature her research and teaching interests include British
 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xix

prose fiction from the nineteenth century onwards as well as contempo-

rary drama; a special focus lies on film and television, extending more
recently to other visual and new media.
Daniel Jonah Wolpert is a College supervisor at Trinity Hall, University
of Cambridge, UK. He is currently working on a book on German Post-
war film under Allied Occupation.
 List of Figures

Fig. 17.1 African Burial Ground National Monument 323

Fig. 17.2 Dedication on the Wall of Remembrance 327
Fig. 17.3 The Ancestral Libation Court 328
Fig. 17.4 Overlay: outline of the historical and the current situation 331

xxi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Exploring the Spatiality

of the City Across Cultural Texts

Rebekka Rohleder and Martin Kindermann

“The city” is everywhere. Both public and academic discourse are

endlessly fascinated with it; with the city of the future and the past; with
megacities; with the voting behavior of city dwellers as opposed to that
of the inhabitants of the countryside; with urban riots; with gentrifica-
tion; with the city as utopia, dystopia, or heterotopia, to name but a
few of the ideas which come to mind. Is there then still anything to say
about a concept that has been so thoroughly explored, and about which
academic disciplines ranging from geography, sociology, and urban studies
to literary and cultural studies are already supplying a constant stream of
publications?
Of course, this is at least partly a rhetorical question, coming as it does
in the introduction of another such publication—in a place, that is, which
implies that the intended answer will be, yes, of course there is still some-
thing interesting to be said about the city that has not been said yet, and

R. Rohleder (B)
University of Flensburg (EUF), Flensburg, Germany
M. Kindermann
Joseph Carlebach School Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany

© The Author(s) 2020 1

M. Kindermann and R. Rohleder (eds.), Exploring the Spatiality
of the City across Cultural Texts, Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-55269-5_1
2 R. ROHLEDER AND M. KINDERMANN

that will follow in this volume. We believe that of course. But the question
is not meant quite so dishonestly. After all, the concept which supplies the
framework for the following chapters is not simply the city itself, but its
narrative construction. This means that it is precisely the ideas and debates
which we have just named which will themselves be under scrutiny. They
all stand for specific ideas of the city, and in this volume such ideas of the
city will be analyzed for their narrative construction and its implications.
Indeed, the idea itself that the city is constructed in and through narra-
tives arguably needs some scrutiny, too, and we intend to provide that in
this introduction. It is, to begin with, surely an appealing idea, even in its
most paradoxical-sounding form. To give an example: in his essay “The
Decay of Lying,” Oscar Wilde plays with the idea that art has the power
to change reality—including the city. It is art, according to Wilde, which
has created the famous London fogs:

The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London
during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of art. […]
There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were.
But no one saw them, and so we do not know anything about them. They
did not exist till art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs
are carried to excess.1

The Aestheticist point about life imitating art in Wilde’s witty play
on the line between the plausible—artistic representation creating aware-
ness of the fog—and the implausible—artistic representation creating the
fog itself, and “carry[ing it] to excess”—is not quite the same point
that a literary scholar today might want to make about the relationship
between art and urban space. As for the actual London fogs themselves,
they were not a natural phenomenon that had existed “for centuries”
without being noticed, but a form of smog, not quite as recent as Wilde
makes them, but still historically specific and largely the product of coal
rather than art. But the nineteenth-century London fogs as a cultural
phenomenon are arguably a completely different thing from a twenty-
first-century smog, which carries all the implications of air pollution and
the necessity of countermeasures, but which does not lend itself to crime
fiction or impressionist painting in the same way as the nineteenth-century

1 Oscar Wilde, “The Decay of Lying,” in Collected Works of Oscar Wilde (Ware:
Wordsworth Editions, 1997), 919–943 (937).
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back
back