Urban Formalism: The Work of City Reading

David Faflik

Published by Fordham University Press 2020

Urban Formalism

The Work of City Reading

David Faflik

In the series Polis: Fordham Series in Urban Studies

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823288052

Overview
Contents

About this book

This book examines how the city peoples of New York and Paris interpreted their urban surroundings during the middle decades of the nineteenth century. At the center of this examination are the literary, material, political, and visual forms which afforded contemporaries new ways of “reading” the modern metropolis.

Demonstrates “urban formalism” to be the basis for both a cultural history of forms, and a new form of urban history

Author / Editor information

Faflik David :

David Faflik is Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, he is the author of Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840–1860 (Northwestern University Press, 2012), Melville and the Question of Meaning (Routledge, 2018), and Transcendental Heresies: Harvard and the Modern American Practice of Unbelief (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).David Faflik is Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, he is the author of Boarding Out: Inhabiting the American Urban Literary Imagination, 1840–1860 (Northwestern University Press, 2012), Melville and the Question of Meaning (Routledge, 2018), and Transcendental Heresies: Harvard and the Modern American Practice of Unbelief (University of Massachusetts Press, 2020).

Reviews

David Henkin, author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York:
Don’t be misled by the subtitle. This is a big and ambitious book that proposes to collapse the conventional distinction between urban experience and urban interpretation/representation. While rereading familiar texts and images from nineteenth-century New York and Paris, Faflik illuminates patterns of shared perception, structures of collective consciousness, and ordering frames that both comprise and distort modern city life. In the process, he offers students of literature and cultural history a provocatively and deceptively simple category – form – for describing what it is they study.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Strong reading, or the literary conversion of the urban Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
2. Reading the urban form of fire Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	46
3. The revolutionary formalism of France Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	72
4. Photography and the image of the city Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	96
Afterword Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	124
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	131
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	149
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	179

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 144
Illustrations
- Illustrations: 12
- Other: 12
Keywords: cities; urban; metropolis; reading; New York; Paris; nineteenth century; form; formalism; modernity

eBook

Published: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 9780823288052