Author: Kevin Lynch
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 1964-06-15
Total Pages: 212
ISBN-13: 9780262620017
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The classic work on the evaluation of city form. What does the city's form actually mean to the people who live there? What can the city planner do to make the city's image more vivid and memorable to the city dweller? To answer these questions, Mr. Lynch, supported by studies of Los Angeles, Boston, and Jersey City, formulates a new criterion—imageability—and shows its potential value as a guide for the building and rebuilding of cities. The wide scope of this study leads to an original and vital method for the evaluation of city form. The architect, the planner, and certainly the city dweller will all want to read this book.
Author: Burton Pike
Publisher:
Published: 1992
Total Pages: 183
ISBN-13: 9780835761529
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Joan Ramon Resina
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-08-06
Total Pages: 289
ISBN-13: 1501729667
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Criticism on the textual and iconographic construction of the city is extensive, yet the problem of historical change in representations of "the urban" has received little attention. Believing traditional accounts are limited by their reflection of a specific historical moment, Joan Ramon Resina and Dieter Ingenschay focus, by contrast, on transition. In essays written for this volume, scholars of literary and visual studies, the history of architecture, cultural theory, and urban geography explore the ways perceptual or conceptual paradigms of the city supersede or replace others, while at the same time retaining the "after-image" of what went before. The writers touch on a wide variety of issues related to contemporary urban cultures as they journey through cities including New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Tijuana, Berlin, and London. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Camilo José Cela, Honoré de Balzac, and Alfred Stieglitz, their approach is broadly cultural rather than technical. After-Images of the City takes into account the intrinsic instability of the image and reveals that representations of the modern metropolis cannot be fixed in time and history.
Author: Margaret Hillenbrand
Publisher: BRILL
Published: 2007
Total Pages: 374
ISBN-13: 9004154787
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This book is a cross-cultural, interdisciplinary study which compares responses to modernity in the literary cultures of contemporary Japan and Taiwan. Moving beyond the East-West paradigm that has traditionally dominated comparativism, the volume explores these literatures within the regional frame.
Author: Hana Wirth-Nesher
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 1996-01-26
Total Pages: 268
ISBN-13: 9780521473149
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →City Codes is a study of the representation of the city in the modern novel that takes difference as its point of departure, so that cities are read according to the cultural and social position of the urbanite. These urban narratives are analysed in the context of a cultural repertoire of city codes, from the architectural features of window and street to the social and historical signs of the landmark and the passer-by, with the emphasis on the subject's construction of his or her place as shaped by history, politics, nationality, gender, class and race. The study moves from boundaries inscribed onto the cityscape to distances experienced by the city dwellers; its 'real' and textual cities are Warsaw, Jerusalem, New York, Chicago, Paris, London and Dublin. The novels discussed are by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Amos Oz, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, Henry James, Henry Roth, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf.
Author: Richard Lehan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2023-09-01
Total Pages: 350
ISBN-13: 0520920511
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This sweeping literary encounter with the Western idea of the city moves from the early novel in England to the apocalyptic cityscapes of Thomas Pynchon. Along the way, Richard Lehan gathers a rich entourage that includes Daniel Defoe, Charles Dickens, Emile Zola, Bram Stoker, Rider Haggard, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Raymond Chandler. The European city is read against the decline of feudalism and the rise of empire and totalitarianism; the American city against the phenomenon of the wilderness, the frontier, and the rise of the megalopolis and the decentered, discontinuous city that followed. Throughout this book, Lehan pursues a dialectic of order and disorder, of cities seeking to impose their presence on the surrounding chaos. Rooted in Enlightenment yearnings for reason, his journey goes from east to west, from Europe to America. In the United States, the movement is also westward and terminates in Los Angeles, a kind of land's end of the imagination, in Lehan's words. He charts a narrative continuum full of constructs that "represent" a cycle of hope and despair, of historical optimism and pessimism. Lehan presents sharply etched portrayals of the correlation between rationalism and capitalism; of the rise of the city, the decline of the landed estate, and the formation of the gothic; and of the emergence of the city and the appearance of other genres such as detective narrative and fantasy literature. He also mines disciplines such as urban studies, architecture, economics, and philosophy, uncovering material that makes his study a lively read not only for those interested in literature, but for anyone intrigued by the meanings and mysteries of urban life.
Author: Kevin R. McNamara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-10-06
Total Pages: 319
ISBN-13: 1107028035
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →This Companion offers readers an accessible survey of the historical and symbolic relationships between literature and the city.
Author: Gyan Prakash
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2010-09-27
Total Pages: 286
ISBN-13: 140083662X
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Dystopic imagery has figured prominently in modern depictions of the urban landscape. The city is often portrayed as a terrifying world of darkness, crisis, and catastrophe. Noir Urbanisms traces the history of the modern city through its critical representations in art, cinema, print journalism, literature, sociology, and architecture. It focuses on visual forms of dystopic representation--because the history of the modern city is inseparable from the production and circulation of images--and examines their strengths and limits as urban criticism. Contributors explore dystopic images of the modern city in Germany, Mexico, Japan, India, South Africa, China, and the United States. Their topics include Weimar representations of urban dystopia in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis; 1960s modernist architecture in Mexico City; Hollywood film noir of the 1940s and 1950s; the recurring fictional destruction of Tokyo in postwar Japan's sci-fi doom culture; the urban fringe in Bombay cinema; fictional explorations of urban dystopia in postapartheid Johannesburg; and Delhi's out-of-control and media-saturated urbanism in the 1980s and 1990s. What emerges in Noir Urbanisms is the unsettling and disorienting alchemy between dark representations and the modern urban experience. In addition to the editor, the contributors are David R. Ambaras, James Donald, Rubén Gallo, Anton Kaes, Ranjani Mazumdar, Jennifer Robinson, Mark Shiel, Ravi Sundaram, William M. Tsutsui, and Li Zhang.
Author: Therese Fuhrer
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
Published: 2015-05-19
Total Pages: 328
ISBN-13: 3110400960
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The term ‘cityscaping’ is here introduced to characterise the creative process through which the image of the city is created and represented in various media– text, film and artefacts. It thus turns attention away from built urban spaces and onto mental images of cities. One focus is on the question of which literary, visual and acoustic means prompt their recipients’ spatial imagination; another is to inquire into the semantics and functions that are ascribed to the image of a city as constructed in various media. The examples of ancient texts and works of art, and modern literature and films, are used to elucidate the artistic potential of images of the city and the techniques by which they are semanticised. With its interdisciplinary approach, the volume for the first time makes clear how strongly mental images of urban space, both ancient and modern, have been shaped by the techniques of their representation in media.