1 Introduction: Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts
Rebekka Rohleder and Martin Kindermann
Part 1 The City and the Text/ the City as a Text
2 City Scripts / City Scapes. On the Intertextuality of Urban Experience
Andreas Mahler
3 (Urban) Sacred Places and Profane Spaces—Theological Topography in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
Verena Keidel
4 Traveling Discourses: The Works of Pavel Ulitin (1918-1986) and the Problem of Narrative Alternatives
Daria Baryshnikova
Part 2 Television Reading the City
5 “This America, man.” Narrating and Reading Urban Space in The Wire
Christopher Schliephake
6 Reading the City: ‘Mind Mapping’ in the BBC’s Sherlock
Janina Wierzoch
Part 3 Conflicting Narratives
7 Transcription: Addressing the Interactivity between Urban and Architectural Spaces and their Use
Klaske Maria Havik
8 Politics and the Production of Space: Downtown and Out with Rancière and Lefebvre
Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich
9 The People of New Jerusalem: Narratives of Social In- and Exclusion in Rotterdam after the Blitz of 1940
Stefan Couperus
10 Smart City Narratives and Narrating Smart Urbanism
Anke Strüver and Sybille Bauriedl
Part 4 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
Martin Kindermann
12 Gender and the City: Virginia Woolf’s London between Promise of Freedom and Structural Confinement
Claudia Heuer
Part 5 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
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
Joshua Parker
Part 6 Dis/Continuities
15 Finding Causes for Events: The City as Normative Narrative
Rebekka Rohleder
16 Private Topographies: Visions of Tōkyō in Modern Japanese Literature
Gala Maria Follaco
17 Reading Against the Grain—Black Presence in Lower Manhattan, New York City
Tazalika M. te Reh
Martin Kindermann is an English teacher. Previously, he worked as a Research Assistant at the University of Hamburg, Germany, and was a Research Fellow at the Free University of Berlin, Germany. He has published on religious poetry in the 19th and 20th century, Anglo-Jewish and Anglo-Muslim Writing, and the construction of space in literature as well as questions of post-coloniality and interculturality.
Rebekka Rohleder is Research Assistant at the University of Flensburg, Germany. Previously, she worked at the University of Hamburg’s Department for English and American Studies. Her research interests include British Romanticism, literary space, and depictions of work in contemporary culture. In 2019, she published “A Different Earth”: Literary Space in Mary Shelley’s Novels.
Exploring the Spatiality of the City across Cultural Texts: Narrating Spaces, Reading Urbanity explores the narrative formations of urbanity from an interdisciplinary perspective. Within the framework of the “spatial turn,” contributors from disciplines ranging from geography and history to literary and media studies theorize narrative constructions of the city and cities, and analyze relevant examples from a variety of discourses, media, and cities. Subdivided into six sections, the book explores the interactions of city and text—as well as other media—and the conflicting narratives that arise in these interactions. Offering case studies that discuss specific aspects of the narrative construction of Berlin and London, the text also considers narratives of urban discontinuity and their theoretical implications. Ultimately, this volume captures the narratological, artistic, material, social, and performative possibilities inherent in spatial representations of the city.