Postmodern Cities

Bentley, NP

Abstract

Postmodern cities. 5,000 words. This chapter discusses the two principal strands of the postmodern city novel: texts in which the city is presented as a verbal labyrinth, simulacrum, or technoscape (e. g. the fiction of Auster, Borges, Calvino, Murakami, Pamuk), and texts that depict the city as conceived in postmodern urbanist discourse: the city defined by branded spaces – consumerist simulacra of properly historical urban spaces – existing amidst dilapidated interstitial spaces (e.g., Martin Amis, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, José Saramago, Iain Sinclair, but including novels of any comparable city wherever sited), and the entwining of the two strands as the city and the lives it sustains work out their entropic trajectories, primarily absent the sort of crisis that qualifies the fictional city as properly dystopian. The presentation of the subject locates the literature in relation to poststructuralist thought or theories of postmodern urban and social theory by citing relevant theorists. It identifies, as appropriate, the presence and force of redemptive energies in the literature, and highlights the engagements with, and critiques of the history and enabling ideologies of postwar urban (re)development to the extent that they present themselves in the content and the form of the texts discussed.

Citation

Bentley, N. (2014). Postmodern Cities. In K. McNamara (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature (175--187). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139235617.015

• Publication Date: 2014
• Deposit Date: May 31, 2023
• Pages: 175--187
• Series Title: Cambridge Companions
• Book Title: The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139235617.015
• Keywords: Postmodernism, The City in Literature and Culture, Martin Amis, Paul Auster, J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, Bret Easton Ellis, Doris Lessing, Haruki Murakami, Chick Palahniuk, Orhan Pamuk, José Saramago, Will Self, Iain Sinclair
• Publisher URL: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-companion-to-the-city-in-literature/postmodern-cities/3D6EFF5B3173A3F2ABD41D102BA06FC7