Utopia, Equity and Ideology in Urban Texts: Fair and Unfair Cities

ISBN-13: 9783031258541 / Angielski

Michael G. Kelly; Mariano Paz

Opis

Utopia, Equity and Ideology in Urban Texts: Fair and Unfair Cities explores the complex interrelations of three key critical topics across a diverse range of urban writing. Interrogating the links and tensions between aesthetic and political priorities in the representation and imagining of urban life, the volume engages with work from a wide variety of linguistic and cultural origins and across a range of textual practices having the urban phenomenon as a common framing concern. Individual contributions discussing genre and literary fiction, poetic writing, documentary and essayistic texts, planning manifestos and municipal communications materials serve to demonstrate that the nuanced treatments of urban experience and potential which may be gleaned from across this textual spectrum act as a pragmatic corrective to purely conceptual approaches. As such, the volume consolidates the emerging dialogue between the fields of utopian studies and literary urban studies, understanding these as complementary approaches to the reading of the city and its textual prolongations.

Spis treści

1 Fair and Unfair Cities: Equity, Ideology, Utopia.

Part I Histories of the Future.

2 The Dialectics of Revery: Daydreaming and the (Un)Fair City, 1794–1922.

3 Utopia as Urban Testing Ground: Spatial and Social Forms in the Works of Ebenezer Howard and H.G. Wells.

4 Utopia and Agoraphobia in 1920s Marseilles: Empty Space in the Work of László Moholy-Nagy and Siegfried Kracauer.

5 Ideological Troubles in the Proletarian Paradise: The Four Cities of Werner Illing’s Utopolis (1930).

6 Prince Charles’ A Vision of Britain as Populist Retrotopia.

Part II Reclaiming and Remaking.

7 ‘Another World is Plantable’: Community Gardening and Urban Planning.

8 Imaginaries of the Future City: Envisioning Climate Change and Technological Cityscapes through Dutch Contemporary Speculative Fiction.

9 Both Kinds of Occupation: Reclaiming and Remaking the City in Contemporary Poetry.

10 Navigating Beyond Gender: The City in Feminist Science Fiction.

11 Pathways Towards Utterance in Contemporary French Poetic Practice: Framing the Urban Real.

Part III Fictional Fieldwork.

12 Aztecs and Angels in Mexico City: Urban Palimpsests and Social Critique in Fictions by Homero Aridjis and Edgar Clement.

13 Utopianism and the Writing of Lisbon in José Saramago’s Historical Fiction.

14 Unruly Utopia: Divergent Spatialities in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

15 Confronting Otherness: The Built Environments in Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Shadows of the Apt.

16 ‘City Which Holds All Times and Places’: On Urban Landscape in Maggie Gee’s The Flood.

O autorze

Michael G. Kelly is Senior Lecturer in French and head of subject at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where he is also Director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies. He is the author of a study on the relations of utopia and modern French poetry, Strands of Utopia. Spaces of Poetic Work in Twentieth-Century France, and has published widely on a range of topics in modern and contemporary French and comparative literature.

Mariano Paz is Lecturer in Spanish and head of subject at the University of Limerick, Ireland, where he is Associate Director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies. He has published widely on the topic of dystopian and science fiction cinemas, with a focus on the representation of ideology and urban spaces in Latin American film.

Blurb

“This collection maps the terrain of an ‘inter-discipline’ that cuts across and draws together literary studies, philosophy, architecture and visual culture, to name just some of the domains with which its contributors engage. Ranging in time from the nineteenth century into imagined futures, and across our world and others, the volume helps us reimagine and rethink questions of urban existence, coexistence and community, and shows how now more than ever, thinking through forms of urban utopia inevitably involves thinking in planetary terms.”

—Edward Welch, Carnegie Professor of French University of Aberdeen, UK

Utopia, Equity and Ideology in Urban Texts: Fair and Unfair Cities explores the complex interrelations of three key critical topics across a diverse range of urban writing. Interrogating the links and tensions between aesthetic and political priorities in the representation and imagining of urban life, the volume engages with work from a wide variety of linguistic and cultural origins and across a range of textual practices having the urban phenomenon as a common framing concern. Individual contributions discussing genre and literary fiction, poetic writing, documentary and essayistic texts, planning manifestos and municipal communications materials serve to demonstrate that the nuanced treatments of urban experience and potential which may be gleaned from across this textual spectrum act as a pragmatic corrective to purely conceptual approaches. As such, the volume consolidates the emerging dialogue between the fields of utopian studies and literary urban studies, understanding these as complementary approaches to the reading of the city and its textual prolongations. 

Michael G. Kelly is Senior Lecturer in French and Director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick.

Mariano Paz is Lecturer in Spanish and Associate Director of the Ralahine Centre for Utopian Studies at the University of Limerick.