Cities of Words: Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature

John M. Ganim

MLQ: Modern Language Quarterly, Volume 63, Number 3, September 2002,

pp. 365-382 (Review)

Published by Duke University Press

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https://muse.jhu.edu/article/22942

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Review Essay

Cities of Words: Recent Studies on

Urbanism and Literature

John M. Ganim

The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History. By Richard Lehan.

Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xvi + 330 pp.
October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature. By Carlo Rotella. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1998. xii + 358 pp.
Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London. By
Sharon Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. x + 323 pp.
White Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth-Century American Novel. By Cather-
ine Jurca. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2001. viii + 238 pp.

The city is one of the great subjects of literature, both ancient and
modern. Not surprisingly, the study of the city in literature is a mature
enterprise. Hundreds of scholarly books are devoted to the represen-
tation of the city in specific works or authors throughout various peri-
ods. That scholarship has relied on a certain conception of the city,
on a stark distinction between city and country, resolving itself into the
themes of urbanism and antiurbanism. But the notion of the strict sep-
aration of the urban and the rural, embodied in such iconic images as
the walled city of the Middle Ages, the fortified city of the seventeenth
century, the Puritan stockade staring out into the primeval forest, even
the smokestacks of the industrial city viewed from the refuge of its
hills, has given way to urban conglomerations that can be mapped only
by satellite, a landscape in which nature is preserved only by culture.
The identification of city life with civilization itself, growing out of both
etymology and a Whig sense of progress as defined by urban com-
merce, has been called into question, especially in America, where the

Modern Language Quarterly 63:3, September 2002. © 2002 University of Washington.

366 MLQ ❙ September 2002

centripetal development of corporate cores encircled by acres of

poverty, so often reflected in the urban landscapes of science fiction
and cinema, has replaced some of the older icons of the city.
New theories and practices of urbanism and city planning have
complicated the assumptions behind the old polarities and have
accorded new importance and new complexity to space as a category
of analysis and criticism. Why should space be regarded as dead, asked
Michel Foucault a quarter century ago, and time valorized as dialecti-
cal, dynamic, and creative?1 Foucault was honing a position forged a
decade before, in the early 1960s, by Henri Lefebvre, who elevated the
analysis of space to the same position as that of other historical mate-
rials, dissecting its politics, its ownership, its relations to power.2 Post-
colonial theory has replaced the vocabulary of time that has dominated
our thinking about nations since Romanticism with the vocabulary of
space (location, position, opposition, construction, nationhood, colo-
niality). Feminist urbanism, most famously the work of Dolores Hay-
den, has pointed to the ways in which space itself is fraught with the
implications of gender and has suggested how critical the concept of
the domestic is to understanding architecture and urbanism.3 Geogra-
phers such as Edward W. Soja have helped us think in terms of regions
as well as cities and have delineated the complex multilayerings of dif-
ferent “cities.”4 In city planning circles the totalizing plans of mod-
ernist urbanism have given way to interventions and concerns for con-

1 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” diacritics, no. 16 (1986): 22 – 27; Foucault,

Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972 – 1977, ed. and trans.
Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 63 –77.
2 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991).

3 Dolores Hayden, The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for

American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981).
4 Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social

Theory (London: Verso, 1989).

John M. Ganim is professor of English at the University of California,

Riverside, and author of several books on medieval literature and
many articles on architecture and urbanism. He founded the Seminar
on Architecture, Urbanism, and Theory at the Center for Ideas in Soci-
ety at UC Riverside. A related review essay, “Recent Studies on Litera-
ture, Architecture, and Urbanism,” appeared in MLQ 56:3 (1995).
Ganim ❙ Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature 367

text. The very concepts of the city and the urban are being transformed
into different and as yet unnamed configurations.
Indeed, there is an ongoing debate about the nature of the post-
urban. During the Progressive Era improvements for working-class and
immigrant residential areas and grand Parisian neoclassical monu-
ments for city centers dominated the design of American cities. From
the 1920s on the so-called Chicago school of urban sociology studied
the demographics, planning, and social relations in the classic indus-
trial cities of the East and Midwest, replacing the sanitizing metaphors
of progressivism with a gritty understanding of the experience of
urbanism. These movements depended on traditional thinking about
centers and peripheries, about circulation and service zones. In the
1950s and 1960s Jane Jacobs wrote her eloquent defenses of urban
neighborhoods, celebrating the mixture and diversity of street life, in
ways that resonate today through debates about the “New Urbanism”
and the relationship of density to public safety.5 But in the 1970s and
1980s it was not Chicago or New York that provided the model of
urban analysis but Los Angeles, or, more generally, southern Califor-
nia. In Postmodern Geographies Soja regards such areas as no longer cen-
tered cities in the classic sense but virtually archaeological sites, where
multiple urbanisms compete with and overlay each other. Even the
division between city and suburb, let alone between either of them and
country, has been questioned in Joel Garreau’s book Edge City, whose
title has entered modern usage as an almost self-defining phrase.6
Scholars of urbanism now talk about an “L.A. school” that has taught
us how to think about the potentials and problems of the new urban,
or posturban, patterns. These new conceptions of social space and
urbanism have considerable implications for the rewriting of nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century literary history.
To varying degrees, the books under review pursue these implica-
tions. They should be thought of as continuing an animated conversa-
tion that includes such studies as Kevin R. McNamara’s Urban Verbs,
which collocates various forms of recent urban and literary theory and
urban literature; Hana Wirth-Nesher’s City Codes, which seeks a Calvino-

5 Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random

House, 1961); Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (New York: Random House, 1969).
6 Joel Garreau, Edge City: Life on the New Frontier (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
368 MLQ ❙ September 2002

like semiotic of urban fiction and visual representation and the con-
flicting, often overdetermined signs that structure the city both in lit-
erature and in the urban environment; Carla Cappetti’s Writing Chi-
cago, which argues for the dialogue between the Chicago novel and
the Chicago school of urban sociology as akin to and equal in signifi-
cance to naturalism’s dialogue with nineteenth-century social ideas;
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson’s Paris As Revolution, which charts the asso-
ciation of Paris with revolutionary activity and subjectivity up through
the Exposition of 1889; and Wyn Kelley’s Melville’s City, which links
Melville’s sense of the city with popular cultural representations of New
York.7 These books share a sense of the city as more undefined and
inchoate, as more decentered physically, culturally, and in terms of
authority and power, than previous studies. They call on popular writ-
ing, technical and scientific archives, and popular culture as a dialectic
with high literature. Sometimes divided in their methodological alle-
giances between material culture and literary theory, they seek to
locate both surreal and naturalistic fictions as responses to the city. In
these studies novels become like little cities themselves, simulated
models of urbanism that plot disaster, survival, grandeur, and every-
day life. Attuned to how the imaginative representation of the city can
shape the built environment, they also read literary (and other) texts
as open forms, almost becoming part of the cities they describe.
Richard Lehan’s City in Literature may seem the least affected by
new urban and spatial theory, but that is partly because of his polemi-
cal engagement with much recent writing on urbanism and literature,
especially Jean Baudrillard’s celebration of simulation and Fredric
Jameson’s classic article “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of
Late Capitalism,” and partly because Lehan takes on many centuries of
writing about the city. (On the other hand, he demonstrates a sympa-
thetic reading both of Baudelaire and of Walter Benjamin’s definitive

7Kevin R. McNamara, Urban Verbs: Arts and Discourses of American Cities (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996); Hana Wirth-Nesher, City Codes: Reading
the Modern Urban Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Carla Cap-
petti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1993); Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris As Revolution: Writing the
Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Wyn Kelley,
Melville’s City: Literary and Urban Form in Nineteenth-Century New York (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Ganim ❙ Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature 369

reading of him as the flaneur.)8 One cannot help thinking of Lehan’s

book as a companion to Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis, with the represen-
tation of the city replacing Auerbach’s “representation of reality” as its
focus.9 Auerbach does not always focus on “reality,” of course, and nei-
ther does Lehan on the city. At times one seems to be reading parallel
histories, one of the city and one of literature. Lehan’s most profound
debt, however, is to another big book, Lewis Mumford’s City in History,
to which Lehan alludes in his title (as he does to Mumford’s Culture of
Cities in his subtitle).10 Lehan’s book draws much of its power from the
humanist modernism that he shares with Mumford. At the same time,
Lehan’s argument, like Mumford’s, is limited by his failure adequately
to address the ongoing critique of both humanism and modernism.
This is not to say that Lehan should have caved in to fashion, but his
position and even his textual tradition seem to want to stop history at
about 1965, roughly when the modernist city, modern architecture,
and the modernist literary tradition began to unravel amid a series
of crises. Lehan prefigures that shift in a superb reading of Thomas
Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, in which he persuasively describes the
nature of postmodern fiction, yet he insufficiently acknowledges par-
allel developments in urbanism. Indeed, a peculiar consequence of his
approach is that we can read about an author for several pages and
not have the slightest idea that Lehan’s book is about the city in litera-
ture. Instead, the book is often a perceptive, convincing general
description of a series of writers, as if it were a standard literary survey
with the theme of the city as an occasion.
Lehan sets his story against the received history of the Western city,
which he summarizes with characteristic clarity. He then focuses on the
commercial city of the Enlightenment, the industrial city of the Victo-
rian era, and the twentieth-century American city, which he follows to

8 Jean Baudrillard, America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1989); Fredric

Jameson, “Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left
Review, no. 146 (1984): 53 – 93; Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the
Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: Verso, 1983).
9 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.

Willard R. Trask (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1953).

10 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its

Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961); Mumford, The Culture of
Cities (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1938).
370 MLQ ❙ September 2002

the point of its redevelopment (a point that Carlo Rotella begins with
in October Cities). In so doing, Lehan provides elegant summaries not
only of urban planning and development during these centuries but of
major literary and intellectual movements, including the Enlighten-
ment, Romanticism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism. His
thesis sounds simplistic: the realistic novel through Dickens represents
the city in mechanistic and financial terms; the complexity of the
industrial city is found in the modernism of T. S. Eliot and James Joyce;
and the inscrutable nature of the postindustrial city has an analogue in
the postmodernism of Pynchon. Lehan’s subtle readings, however, are
anything but simplistic. His favored genre, despite fine readings of
William Carlos Williams and Hart Crane, is the novel, and his favored
theme is the consciousness of the self in relation to the city. Lehan’s
city, for all his awareness of urban history and his commitment to a plu-
ralist politics, is a city of alienation, the city of the existential tradition
that he has so persuasively elucidated previously. It is a site of anxiety, in
keeping with a sociology of the city that includes Georg Simmel and
Oswald Spengler. This city is always at the point of dissolution or chaos,
always subject to entropy. Indeed, the latter parts of the book are the
most striking and original, especially the part dealing with more or less
popular fiction — Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Hag-
gard — and with the high literature that exploits that tradition, that is,
Pynchon. Lehan makes some excellent points consonant with recent
postcolonial studies when he suggests that these novels often feature
foreigners as interlopers and crowd scenes populated by colonial for-
eigners; thus they reveal an anxiety about the nature of Englishness. In
this very good big book there may be, in fact, a great little book on
underground cities, on the imaginary cities that, Calvino-like, always
underlie the cities we think we live in.
This foray into noncanonical or quasi-canonical literature is a rare
treat in a book that spends much of its time on widely studied authors.
I missed, for instance, a consideration of the understudied writers,
such as John O’Hara, Norman Mailer, and Gore Vidal, who do a fine
job of dramatizing the reconfiguration of power in the postwar Amer-
ican city. Lehan’s emphasis on the academic canon of American and
British literature is, however, complemented by the study of non-
canonical and semipopular writers in the other three books under
Ganim ❙ Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature 371

review. Lehan’s history (and his version of the city) begins to wind
down in the 1950s and 1960s, roughly when Rotella’s October Cities
begins. Where Lehan does cover more recent fiction, it is to trace the
tradition of existential dread in writers such as Don DeLillo and Paul
Auster, whose cities are in many ways still the cities of the 1950s and
1960s. Hence Rotella pursues a question that Lehan only touches on:
what happens to urban literature in a posturban, postindustrial cul-
ture? Rotella takes three concrete cases — Chicago, Philadelphia, and
New York — at a specific moment, the postwar era of “redevelopment”
in America’s older industrial cities. Familiar with the classic studies of
the Chicago school of urban sociology, Rotella notes how its models
fail to account for the corrosive changes of the 1950s and 1960s. He
takes some marginal literary texts as his examples, Nelson Algren’s
Man with the Golden Arm for Chicago, for instance, and suggests that
their status is related to our inability to understand the urban trans-
formation they discussed and were part of.11 Algren’s world is of a
neighborhood abandoned by the sweeping changes around it, and the
few inhabitants who cannot escape view these changes with nostalgia
yet also apocalyptic imaginings. Rotella suggests that not only these
characters — the mentally ill, addicts, small-time crooks, people too
weak or tired or poor to get out —but Algren himself are victims of
these changes and have no viable way to avoid them. Just as Lehan’s
narrative is one of existential anxiety as the individual turns to the city
for meaning, so Rotella’s is one of heroic (or antiheroic) resistance by
unlikely protagonists against great odds. In Rotella’s account, Algren
sometimes seems to join his characters in this regretful elegy but at
other times seems to be persecuted for writing about what a newly for-
malist literary establishment deemed no longer worthy of representa-
tion. That is, Rotella seems to treat Algren as if he were a character in
his own plots, and, indeed, by the early 1960s Algren seems to have
thought of himself in much the same way. While the “urban crisis” that
crystallized in the late 1960s was interpreted largely in terms of racial
conflict, Rotella demonstrates how older American cities were already
dramatically changing in the early 1950s.

11 Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday,
1949).
372 MLQ ❙ September 2002

These changes, too, were ineluctably connected with racial shifts.

Southern African Americans began to displace the older ethnic ghet-
tos, producing a “second ghetto” just when the economy of American
cities shifted from neighborhood to governmental and corporate core
and from manufacturing to service industries. Consequently, they
lacked the opportunities for upward (and outward) mobility enjoyed,
however belatedly, by earlier immigrant groups. Harlem is probably a
special case, but an inescapable one for literary culture. Rotella, refus-
ing to shy away from its special status, chooses Claude Brown’s memoir
Manchild in the Promised Land as his primary text.12 Recalling its author’s
path from street gangs to reform schools to the university, Brown’s
book was highly successful when it appeared, even though it seemed to
call into question the very processes that had brought it into print,
including white patronage. Brown’s emphasis on defiant individualism,
on being torn between loyalty and survival, was a complex political
message. The recent “’hood” film genre owes a debt to Manchild, which
continues to resonate among young African American writers, partly
because of its unclassifiable politics and multiplicitous view of the city
and partly because of the continuing crisis of ghettoized American
cities. At the same time, Manchild was validated in its day by its appeal
to direct experience and firsthand knowledge. In certain recent writers
whom Rotella analyzes, such as David Bradley, whose work centers on
Philadelphia, awareness of the genre of the ghetto memoir is part of a
literary strategy. Rotella sometimes finds himself in a predicament,
treating journalism successfully as replete with literary technique and
impact but forcing novels to become more a part of the “city of fact”
than he can make them be.
Rotella treats novels, stories, and journalism of the period as evi-
dence equivalent to empirical data; he fuses imaginative and docu-
mentary barometers of change. Taking a phrase from Willa Cather,
Rotella contrasts “cities of feeling” with “cities of fact” (3), the latter
comprising both physical cities and previous conceptions of cities —
an interesting parallel to Lefebvre’s famously difficult triad of interact-
ing “spatial practice,” “representational space,” and “spaces of repre-
sentation” (15). The move allows Rotella, as it does Lefebvre, to discuss

12 Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Macmillan, 1965).
Ganim ❙ Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature 373

“brick and steel and stone, inhabited by people of flesh and blood”
(3) in a dialectical relation to ideas and literary representations. In
one of his most striking analogies, Rotella points out that contempo-
rary theory uses the term traffic to describe “a constructed set of ideas
about the circulation of people and goods” but that theory can empha-
size the textual nature of social phenomena only so far, since “there is
something powerfully unconstructed about being flattened by a speed-
ing car” (3). For New York, Rotella uses not only Manchild but a host of
minor novels. While Chicago and New York have clearly defined if
quite different literary traditions, few readers are likely to consider
Philadelphia in the same league as those cities, but Rotella makes a
convincing case for a literary Philadelphia of recent years, with a dis-
tinct urban tone. The urban patterns and structures of these cities are
quite particular to them, and it is impressive how Rotella makes liter-
ary discriminations that parallel without merely reflecting these differ-
ences. Moreover, his book entirely reorients us to the importance of
writers like Algren and Brown, whom many admire but few can say
much about.
Rotella attempts to take a nonnostalgic attitude to social change.
Instead of lamenting the loss of the neighborhood and the city street,
he shows what happened to them and how people felt about it as it
happened. Indeed, what marks his understanding of the city is his
sense of the neighborhood, which in his readings takes on the quality
of a little province, always in anxious relationship to the city center.
What marks the economic changes of the period Rotella covers, as he
himself points out, is the flow of economic power and wealth from the
ethnic neighborhoods to an increasingly centralized core. The neigh-
borhood, the characters in it, and its resistance to or acceptance of
change are more often buried inside the newspaper than splashed
across the headlines, and it is interesting how many of Rotella’s writers
are also journalists and how easily he moves between their fiction and
nonfiction. He even calls the large body of novels he treats “neighbor-
hood novels.” He does not discuss Los Angeles, the capital of film and
literature noir, however, presumably because during this period it was
not in decline and was not (at least not obviously) an industrial center.
Indeed, the city’s wartime and postwar economy newly industrialized
it. But Rotella leaves out Los Angeles also because it did not have
374 MLQ ❙ September 2002

(again, at least not obviously) classic neighborhoods. Even a writer

such as John Fante, potentially a West Coast counterpart to the mid-
western and East Coast examples, was too mobile to fit into Rotella’s
scheme. For him, the provinciality of the neighborhood, and its essen-
tial conservatism, serves as a barometer for change.
Indeed, October Cities, despite its autumnal, Hegelian title (which
comes from Algren’s description of Chicago), is about change and how
history can be found, even made, in novels. In this regard, it resembles
another great book about cities, Marshall Berman’s All That Is Solid
Melts into Air, in which the ceaseless change of modernity and capital
inevitably uproots the communities and connections so cherished by
the protagonists of Berman’s literary examples.13 Rotella also attrib-
utes an almost epic quality to the redevelopment projects for which
older neighborhoods are torn down, expressways cut huge swaths
through the cityscape, and high-rises are erected on concrete tundras.
Despite the general sense that such progress is not progress but brings
about evil results, and despite a political analysis that suggests how
such transformations have been planned by human interests, an aura
of inevitability and invulnerability is accorded them, perhaps as a
legacy of the naturalistic perspective that Rotella shares with Berman.
Indeed, Rotella describes such projects as “moraines.” Literature, “the
city of feeling,” both registers change and recalls what it was like before
urban transformation took its toll.
Like Rotella, Berman also focuses on lost neighborhoods, includ-
ing those of his own childhood. Interestingly, Mike Davis’s City of
Quartz describes Los Angeles, in other hands the quintessential post-
modern city, in strikingly similar ways, as a city of working-class com-
munities undermined by powerful downtown interests. Though Davis
often identifies with the apocalyptic scenarios he describes in another
book, Ecology of Fear, his real point is that they often mask more sinister
human machinations.14 If in Lehan’s city Mumford and Le Corbusier
can collaborate (which, in retrospect, is unlikely), Rotella’s city feels

13
Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982).
14 Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York:

Verso, 1990); Davis, Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (New
York: Metropolitan, 1998).
Ganim ❙ Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature 375

more like a tragic version of the neighborhoods and streets so com-

pellingly called up by Jacobs’s books, which argue for neighborhoods
and streets as the bases of a rich, varied city life. Jacobs herself took
part in the famous rescue of Manhattan’s Soho, described by Berman;
it was one of the first indications that massive redevelopment of the
American city was not unstoppable. Similarly, Rotella’s chapter on
Philadelphia is anchored by the successful defeat of the expressway that
would have destroyed the South Street area, much as Robert Moses’s
proposed crosstown expressway would have decimated Greenwich Vil-
lage as well as Soho. For Rotella, the novels of Jack Dunphy, William
Smith, David Bradley, Pete Dexter, and Diane McKinney-Whetstone
form a sort of urban microhistory of the revival of Philadelphia neigh-
borhoods. Jacobs’s books have become the sacred texts of neotradi-
tional planning, though the results are more evident in newly gentri-
fied city wards and suburbs that imitate small towns than in the
working-class and lower-middle-class neighborhoods discussed by Rotella,
Berman, and Davis. While Lehan’s view of the city requires him to see
a “failure of liberalism” (162 – 63) as tantamount to the end of the city
as we know it, Rotella, Berman, and Davis express simultaneously radi-
cal and conservative positions that parallel the radicalism and conser-
vatism of the novelists and characters they treat.
Both Lehan and Rotella attempt to take female perspectives and
writers into account, but Rotella’s choice of texts is, admittedly, “domi-
nated by men, and at times it can be buffoonishly male” (15). In addi-
tion to his self-consciously critical gendered perspective, Rotella’s
largely social democratic and Lehan’s largely liberal understandings
of the city still depend on more or less unquestioned polarities that
also inform the depredations they condemn: core and periphery, cen-
ter and neighborhood, city and suburb, domestic and public, indus-
trial and service economies. Feminist criticism has developed in recent
decades by questioning or inverting polarities, and Sharon Marcus and
Catherine Jurca, in two profoundly original books, do just that with
most of our assumptions about the city and literature.
In Apartment Stories Marcus begins by calling into question a num-
ber of truisms about the nineteenth-century city. She critiques the dis-
tinction between domestic, private, and therefore female space and
street-oriented, public, and therefore male space. Using London and
376 MLQ ❙ September 2002

Paris as her case studies, she dismantles the stereotype of an essentially

urban Paris, “capital of the nineteenth century,” and an essentially
domestic architectural and urban culture in London. While contrast-
ing the prototypical Parisian apartment building and London town-
house, she demonstrates that by the middle of the nineteenth century
Paris had begun to borrow British domestic rhetoric and planning
practices. Nevertheless, the literary (and often visual) representation
of these two cities associates them with their paradigmatic housing
forms. While Marcus surveys a wide variety of discourses about the city,
including planning and legal documents, her primary focus in the
Paris chapters are Balzac’s Le cousin Pons and Zola’s Pot-Bouille.
Beginning in the 1820s, when the characteristic streetscape of res-
idential Paris took shape, the apartment house, its structure dictated
by the street’s dimension, was entered through a common foyer or
courtyard and guarded by the feared concierge. The apartment house
was represented as already a public space, its rooms and the comings
and goings of its residents almost open to view. Indeed, it was cele-
brated as a vantage point to view the city. Women were granted the
opportunity to observe and comment on street and city life from there.
The portiere, Marcus suggests, predates and even rivals the flaneur as
mistress of space. The open perspective, in which private and public,
masculine and feminine, merged into each other, is reflected in the
realistic novel, which sees into these rooms and lives and is often set in
the apartment house. Balzac’s narrator is identified with the very
portiere whom the novel represents as tyrannical. London planners
seem to have regarded apartment houses as foreign territory. When
they did build them, they attempted to give them a sense of the privacy
associated with the single-family house through controlled entrances
and exits. British architectural discourse was so invested in the idea of
the single-family house as a model that even these attempts to make
multifamily housing attractive were suspect, and story after story
recounts the horror of shared housing, resulting in plots of shame
involving boarders or, worse, haunted houses. Whereas Lehan gives an
inspired analysis of horror fiction, albeit in a public realm, Marcus ana-
lyzes haunted house tales as versions of failed domesticity. Where Vic-
torian ideology allowed for detailed exposés of squalor and chaos in
the domestic lives of the poor, direct criticism of middle-class domestic
Ganim ❙ Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature 377

life was avoided; even incidental details were suppressed. Fictions about
haunted houses, allowing a mythic representation of domestic anxiety,
suggest a contradiction between a “domestic ideology” (89) of privacy
and the impulse of realism itself to visualize private life.
Though only a minority of London households could afford single-
family houses, Paris increasingly developed zoning laws to encourage
them after midcentury. One implication of Marcus’s account, then, is
to call into question Paris’s reputation as a city of spectacle in the enor-
mous literature on Haussmannization. Pace Baudelaire and Benjamin,
Marcus points out that late-nineteenth-century Parisian planners went to
great lengths to preserve domestic privacy, pursuing, for instance, strict
separations of commercial and residential zones and an ever sharper
distinction between public and private rooms in households. Against
the prevalent notion of separate spheres for men and women, Marcus
claims that normative heterosexuality required that women move
through the streets as if they were “exterior bedrooms” (40), while a
rhetoric of family values encouraged men to involve themselves in
household affairs. Spinsters and younger single women were depicted
with negative force, especially the concierge, presumably for her surveil-
lance of male visual and physical incursions. Zola’s Pot-Bouille provides
an image of the newly sexualized and gendered apartment house,
which represented a threat to patriarchal order. Pot-Bouille suggests the
return of an earlier Paris repressed against the new morality of late-
nineteenth-century France. At the same time, the narration itself moves
from inside to outside, both involved and objective, as if mirroring the
contradictions of the apartment house itself. Where Balzac repre-
sented the permeability of interior and exterior, Zola presents an
image of obsessive interiority, contained to the point of explosion.
If Marcus upsets our received notions of nineteenth-century Paris,
London, and, by extension, the European metropolis that had defined
urbanity since the Enlightenment, Jurca in White Diaspora upsets our
received notions of one of the understudied aspects of American literary
culture, the suburban novel. Just as the suburbs have been the embar-
rassment of American urbanism, so too the suburban novel seems some-
thing of an embarrassment to literary history. The Jeffersonian notion of
culture, embodied in Crèvecoeur’s picture of the American farmer in
his library, informs much of the antiurban tradition of American litera-
378 MLQ ❙ September 2002

ture. A countertradition, amply described by Rotella and Lehan, saw the

American cities as melting pots of literary culture as of much else. But
nothing is supposed to happen in the suburbs.
Jurca’s book, the first to address the literary history of suburbia,
proceeds by critiquing literary attitudes to suburbia. Like Marcus, Jurca
uncovers a male subjectivity in conflict with a certain ideal of domes-
ticity. Indeed, a case can be made that suburban literary history has
been understudied because scholars have shared with writers and their
characters their contempt for the suburbs. While the movement of a
huge percentage of the population from the city to the suburb, like the
prior rise of the city in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen-
turies, has been a hallmark of American life, American literature has
consistently discounted or lamented discourses that in fact correspond
to the actual experiences or desires of most Americans. From Edgar
Rice Burrough’s Tarzan through contemporary writers such as John
Updike and Richard Ford (though Jurca focuses on the years from the
1920s through the 1950s), Jurca uncovers a syndrome of self-pity and
false consciousness among the protagonists of the suburban novel.
The suburban home, the very icon of the domestic in twentieth-
century America, is a site of alienation for the male protagonists of this
genre, a place where they in fact do not feel at home. The protagonist
of John Cheever’s Swimmer, absurdly attempting to escape the geogra-
phy of suburbia, is one obvious image. Tarzan, “Lord of the Suburbs,”
is a less obvious one. The male characters of the suburban novel act as
if they had been exiled to the suburbs instead of choosing to live there.
Material luxuries and physical comforts are described as if they were
punishments. Jurca’s title, White Diaspora, is meant to capture the irony
of this projection. A position possible only through “social dominance”
is fantasized as the result of “subjugation” and “displacement” (4).
From Sinclair Lewis through James M. Cain and Sloan Wilson, the sub-
urban house is defined as a “house” and not a “home.” Jurca’s unlikely
emphasis on the Tarzan novels grows less unlikely when we realize that
Burroughs was one of the developers of Tarzana, an early Los Angeles
suburb, and that the Tarzan novel series as Jurca describes it becomes
increasingly obsessed with defending the white homestead against
African incursion. In the postwar period especially, the decision to
move to less crowded, more luxurious suburban housing is repre-
Ganim ❙ Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature 379

sented in literature (and in social commentary) as an exile or escape

from an inner city now defined as a racialized space. Conversely, the
African American novel, especially Native Son, describes the city as
bounding, confining, and imprisoning and considers transgression
and rebellion as largely spatial activities. In her critique of the domi-
nant trope of the suburb as a site for anxiety, Jurca makes an original
contribution to American studies and to the way we think about
domesticity in literature.
These books are useful not only to literary scholars but, poten-
tially, to architects and planners, who might be persuaded that litera-
ture can be yet another avenue to understanding the complexity of
the lived environment. Indeed, one of America’s most innovative archi-
tects, Eric Owen Moss, is fond of describing Eliot’s Wasteland as the
greatest building of the twentieth century. Though these authors
attempt to position themselves as both literary and cultural historians,
however, these books are, finally, about literature, and their articula-
tion with new urban theory and practice raises interesting questions of
methodology. How does the relationship between the city and repre-
sentation transcend a more or less valuable reflectionist discourse? In
these books a certain metonymy is assumed or uncovered between the
novel and the city. Some novelists, working in traditions as different as
realism, naturalism, and surrealism, not only describe the rhythms and
energies and perspectives of city life but appropriate them and render
them identical to the novel and its many languages. Such an appropri-
ation has several aspects. One is the sense of urban character. The
urban novel, and the scholar of the urban novel, owes a great deal to
the work of Simmel, who suggested that a new human type, the city
dweller, was virtually created by the frenetic pace of city life and was
addicted to the city’s electricity and energy, even when dangerous and
destructive.15 For the past two centuries the city has been regarded as
the great site of modernity. In literature, modernism and its precursors
have understood the urban as both source and subject. This special
experience of modernity was defined by early-twentieth-century social
thinkers, especially Simmel, Benjamin, and Siegfried Kracauer, as an

15 The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. and trans. Kurt H. Wolff (Glencoe, Ill.: Free,

1950), 409 – 24.

380 MLQ ❙ September 2002

analysis of the shock, dislocation, and disorientation occasioned by

unprecedented urbanization, development, and modernization in the
nineteenth century and would seem incommensurate in scale and
pace with anything before then.16 The urban character, in all of these
studies, registers the experience of modernity, even when placed into a
setting, as in Jurca’s book, that mimes the rural.
In addition to analyzing or assuming the urban subject, these stud-
ies also uncover a certain identity between novelistic point of view and
narration and the special ways of seeing that are specific to urban life.
In Benjamin’s now virtually canonical definition of the experience of
the city, both in his massive “Arcades Project” and in his spectacular
brief essays on “Paris, capital of the nineteenth century” and Baude-
laire, the subject who perceives the newly created surroundings of
Paris and is in some sense a creation of them, is the “flaneur.”17 Master
of nothing he surveys, this roving observer experiences at the displays,
amusements, and redevelopment of nineteenth-century Paris a voyeuris-
tic thrill that is the paradigmatic response of the bourgeois subject.
Benjamin suggests that this apparent casualness has an ideological pur-
pose, for it disguises in the illusion of coherence and unity the other-
wise threatening transformations the city is undergoing. Behind the
facades that so fascinate the flaneur, however, the Paris of Baudelaire
reveals the dislocation and emiseration caused by the fantastic but all
too real plans of Haussmann. Benjamin’s own writing demonstrates
an unavoidable dialectic, expressing the frisson of the flaneur along
with the demystification of the social critic. Even the studies, like Mar-
cus’s, that critique the single-minded use of Benjamin’s ideas are
indebted to his identification of a particularly urban way of seeing. For
Marcus and the other authors under review, the narrator of urban fic-
tion is marked by simultaneous or alternating exposure and conceal-
ment. As Jurca observes of her suburban novelists, it is often difficult to
discriminate between the author’s and the character’s points of view in

16 See David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity: Theories of Modernity in the Work of Sim-

mel, Kracauer, and Benjamin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986).

17 See Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings,

ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
1978).
Ganim ❙ Recent Studies on Urbanism and Literature 381

regard to the experience of place and space. These books contribute

typologies other than the flaneur, other ways of looking at the city.
Another methodological question, both of the novels studied and
of the books that study them, is the relationship between time and
space, between history and urban geography. All of these books
attempt to describe change, in terms of both literary form and urban
form. Yet because of their allegiance to place, these critics and the
authors they discuss often consider time as an element transformed
into memory of place. Change is registered by what an apartment
house meant in the early as opposed to the late nineteenth century, by
how a neighborhood “used to be,” by one’s sense of urban decay and
decline as opposed to one’s sometimes idealized notion of civic glory.
Inevitably, such spatialization works against the often subtle historical
analysis of these studies. Rotella’s Chicago and Philadelphia seem
always to be in perceived decline and actual transformation; Jurca’s
suburbs, except for an increase in scale, embody the same contradic-
tory values in the 1950s as in the 1920s; Marcus’s apartment houses,
despite her painstaking analysis, feel the same at the end of the cen-
tury as at the beginning. Interestingly, Lehan, the least influenced by
structuralist and poststructuralist thinking, succeeds in registering
change as a patterned process, in spite of his self-critical elegy for lib-
eral civic culture. For the study of narrative form this quandary sug-
gests that the meanings of place in urban novels, as in cities them-
selves, often create counterhistorical or nonhistorical simultaneities,
so that the city functions as an archaeological site, exposing different
times and subcultures at unexpected moments. Freud was influenced
by Heinrich Schliemann’s peeling back the layers of Troy as a meta-
phor for the unconscious. The cities in these books and in the novels
they study constantly mark a return of the repressed and half-forgotten.
The spatialization of narrative and the haunting memory of place
result in these authors’ approximating the physical experience of cities
in the form and style of their texts.
These largely literary concerns have implications for the construc-
tion of the built environment that I began by sketching. Most urban
planners and architects, despite their often profound literacy, are wary
of thinking about built projects in literary terms and even more wary
of thinking about them in terms of literary theory. Yet these studies,
382 MLQ ❙ September 2002

and the novels and other writings they analyze, offer an avenue to
understanding both the built environment and our responses to it that
escapes more intentionalist and programmatic descriptions. In react-
ing against the grand schemes of modernist design, architects, histori-
ans, and planners have concerned themselves increasingly with human
scale. Richard Sennett’s Flesh and Stone charts the tactile, somatic, olfac-
tory, and other sensual dimensions of cities and the costs of ignoring
them.18 Jacobs’s work has influenced neotraditional planning based on
the importance of the street and the pedestrian experience. Christo-
pher Alexander et al.’s Pattern Language and other studies illustrate the
sometimes haunting emotional and ritual qualities of the smallest
physical details of domestic and public designs, especially entrances,
alcoves, hallways, and windows.19 Rotella, Jurca, Marcus, and Lehan all
help us see how to relate local knowledges and experiences to the
large temporal and physical forces that so often in urban history
threaten to obliterate them. They make a claim for language and liter-
ature in the overwhelmingly visual and physical worlds of architecture
and urbanism.

18 Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization
(New York: Norton, 1994).
19 Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construc-

tion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).