Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities: Art, Literature and Urban Spaces

ISBN-13: 9783319986623 / Angielski / Twarda / 2018 / 254 str.

Monica Manolescu

Spis treści

Chapter 1 Introduction                                                                           

Chapter 2 Walking with Poe: “The Man of the Crowd” from text to street   

The legacies of the flâneur                                                                                                         

Vanishing point: from Poe to Buckingham                                                                              

New forms of following: Poe, the metropolis and virtual communities                                  

                                                                                                                                                      

Chapter 3 Transitions: Happenings and beyond                                

Into the streets: genealogies of urban mapping                                                                        

Oldenburg’s The Street and Kaprow’s Words: the city inside                                                 

Dispersed spatiality: Calling                                                                                                       

Fluxus: drawing lines and maps                                                                                                

                                                                                                                                                      

Chapter 4 Following Vito Acconci                                                      

Inside/outside: boundaries of the page                                                                                      

Urban nuisances: Following Piece and beyond                                                                        

American gifts: home and architecture                                                                                     

                                                                                                                                                      

Chapter 5 Eternal Cities: Rome/Passaic. On Robert Smithson’s

“Monuments of Passaic”                                                                           

An "exploratory path": from Passaic to Rome                                                                        

Cultural and geographic frames                                                                                                

Rome: “the rotting remains of a vanished age”                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                      

Chapter 6 Gordon Matta-Clark’s urban slivers and “word works”        

In the ruins of New York                                                                                                           

Cartographic gaps                                                                                                                      

“Word works”                                                                                                                             

                                                                                                                                                      

Chapter 7 Cartographies and the Texture of Cities: Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City. A San Francisco Atlas                                                                       

The death and renewal of maps                                                                                                

Point of view and renewal                                                                                                          

Identity and performative cartography                                                                                    

“The phantom of place”                                                                                                             

The atlas as method                                                                                                                    

                                                                                                                                                      

Chapter 8 Conclusion: “write a book to get lost”

O autorze

Monica Manolescu is Associate Professor of English at the University of Strasbourg, France. She has published a study of Vladimir Nabokov’s geographies and co-authored a companion to Lolita. She has also written articles on 20^th-century and contemporary American literature and art.

Blurb

Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities: Art, Literature and Urban Spaces explores phenomena of urban mapping in the discourses and strategies of a variety of postwar artists and practitioners of space: Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Buckingham, contemporary Situationist projects. The distinctive approach of the book highlights the interplay between texts and site-oriented practices, which have often been treated separately in critical discussions. Monica Manolescu considers spatial investigations that engage with the historical and social conditions of the urban environment and reflect on its mediated nature. Cartographic procedures that involve walking and surveying are interpreted as unsettling and subversive possibilities of representing and navigating the postwar American city. The book posits mapping as a critical nexus that opens up new ways of studying some of the most important postwar artistic engagements with New York and other American cities.