Review Essay: Specters of the City

See, for example, Katherine Boo's “Shelter and the Storm: When Katrina's Refugees Came to Town,” The New Yorker (November 28, 2005): 82-86, 88, 97.

I admit there are consequences to inserting place where Lefebvre says space, but I will not parry with them here. Henri Lefebvre , The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford, 1991).

Giles attends to Richard Wright's Native Son (New York : Harper Perennial, 1993; rpt. from 1940), Nelson Algren's Man with the Golden Arm (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1949), Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn ( New York: Grove Press, 1964), John Rechy's City of Night (New York: Ballantine, Books, 1973; rpt. from 1963), and Joyce Carol Oates's them (New York: Vanguard Press, 1969).

Robert Beauregard , Voices of Decline: The Postwar Fate of U.S. Cities (New York, 2002; rpt. and rev. from Oxford, 1992 ); Arnold Hirsch , Making of the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (Cambridge, 1983 ); Thomas Sugrue , The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, 1996); June Manning Thomas , Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Baltimore, 1997).

Fredric Jameson , Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism ( Durham, NC, 1991); Jean-Francois Lyotard , La Condition Postmoderne (Paris, 1979); The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abeele, (Manchester, UK, 1988); The Lyotard Reader, ed. Andrew Benjamin ( Oxford, 1989).

June Howard , Form and History in American Literary Naturalism (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985); Alan Trachtenberg , The Incorporation of America (New York, 1982) and elsewhere.

Michael Denning , The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1996): 230-31.

See Lewis Mumford , The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1961).

Lehan focuses on Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (New York : Bantam, 1967) and Gravity's Rainbow (New York: Viking Press,1973) and mentions V (New York: Bantam, 1981; rpts. from 1963), but see also Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion ( New York: Vintage International, 1997; rpt. from 1988).

Carlo Rotella makes an argument for the interaction of the city of fact and the city of feeling—as represented in literature—in October Cities: The Redevelopment of Urban Literature ( Berkeley, 1998).

Allen J. Scott and Edward W. Soja's edited collection The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century ( Berkeley, 1996) is a useful complement to Ulin's, on this question of scale, for example.