UC San Diego

This chapter surveys literary and critical modes of figuring, understanding, and analyzing the space of the city. It argues that, rather than see literary representation as a privileged mode of relating urban experience, literature might sit alongside a more expansive analysis of the many affective and narrative modes that attend to the built environment. After retracing some of the fundamental insights of cultural studies, the chapter asks how the city can be understood as an object of cultural knowledge. Along these lines, it interrogates the axiomatic association of the city with modernity, asking what is occluded or ignored in that association.