Description
- Abstract:
- “Paper Urbanism” explores what I refer to as American literature’s "urban design imagination," as it evolved between the end of the nineteenth century and the close of the twentieth. This term names an overlapping set of thematic preoccupations and formal operations that all, in one way or another, engage the changing built environment of the American city and the two fundamental questions these changes occasined: who should have the authority to intervene in a city’s physical organization, and how should they be expected to use that authority? Literary critics usually draw an opposition between their own textual objects and the reductive abstractions of urbanist disciplines. Literature, in this account, puts us in touch with the lived experience of city-dwelling better than the design schemes of urbanists can. I argue, against this view, that a significant portion of twentieth-century American literature shared with professional agents of urban design a distinctive conception of the urban environment. Like their peers in the planning and architectural fields, many authors viewed the space of the city as a series of choices, as a man-made artifact that could be reconfigured to better resemble someone’s superior idea for it. I chart this conceptual work of urban design through William Dean Howells’ utopian writings, Sinclair Lewis’ rendering of the effects of early-twentieth-century zoning, Ayn Rand’s eroticized appropriations of modernist architecture, June Jordan and Amiri Baraka’s involvement with drafting and pursuing development projects for black communities, and Donald Barthelme’s literary experiments with ephemeral architecture, amongst other literary and historical episodes.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2021
Citation
Gastiger, Michael Joseph,
"Paper Urbanism: American Literature and the Design of Cities"
(2021).
English Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:z7r44tuh/
