‘The world seemed very large around me’: Urban Regeneration and the Sublime in Benjamin Markovits’s You Don’t Have to Live Like This

Peacock, James

Abstract

Halfway through Markovits’ novel about a scheme to regenerate Detroit’s neighbourhoods, the narrator, Greg Marnier (known as Marny), returns from his girlfriend’s apartment in the snow. On Mack Avenue, he starts to feel “scared” and reflects on “the scale of buildings and the general infrastructure,” observing how difficult it is “to keep your sense of proportion, you come out too small” (196). In this paper I argue that what Marny experiences here, and at other points in the story, is a twenty-first-century version of the sublime stemming from his participation in the processes or urban “renewal” and gentrification. It contains aspects of the industrial-metropolitan sublime that Mario Costa associates with modernity, the technological sublime, and also what David E. Nye calls “consumer sublime”. Marny, at such moments, is struck by awareness of the complex negotiations between structure and agency; between local engagement and global forces; between the individual choices one makes and the institutions and ideologies within which one makes them, that characterise the work of regeneration or gentrification.

Citation

Peacock, J. (2023). ‘The world seemed very large around me’: Urban Regeneration and the Sublime in Benjamin Markovits’s You Don’t Have to Live Like This. In Benjamin Markovits Critical Essays. (1). Taylor & Francis (Routledge). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032614892-6

• Online Publication Date: Dec 22, 2023
• Publication Date: Dec 22, 2023
• Deposit Date: Apr 15, 2024
• Publicly Available Date: Jun 23, 2025
• Publisher: Taylor & Francis (Routledge)
• Edition: 1
• Book Title: Benjamin Markovits Critical Essays
• Chapter Number: 5
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032614892-6
• Publisher URL: https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781032614892-6/world-seemed-large-around-james-peacock?context=ubx&refId=87b2bbd4-2426-49c6-82ee-c9db49b5f1dc
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