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In an innovative contribution to the challenging of disciplinary
boundaries, Edward J. Ahearn juxtaposes works of literature with
the writings of social scientists to discover how together they
illuminate city life in ways that neither can accomplish
separately. Ahearn's argument spans from the second half of the
nineteenth century in Western Europe to the present-day United
States and encompasses a wide range of literary genres and
sociological schools. For example, Charles Baudelaire's essays on
the city are viewed alongside the work of Emile Durkheim and Georg
Simmel; Bertolt Brecht's Jungle of Cities heightens the arguments
of Louis Wirth and Robert Park; Richard Wright's Native Son and
Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March are re-visioned in
tandem with works by William Julius Wilson and others; Herman
Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" poses a challenge to James Q.
Wilson's Bureaucracy; Toni Morrison's historical novel Jazz is
buttressed by the career of Robert Moses and the revisionist work
of historians Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson; and Don
DeLillos's Cosmopolis comes into brilliant focus in the light of
arguments on world cybercities by David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and
Manuel Cassels. Resisting the temptation to ignore contradictions
for the sake of interpretation, Ahearn instead offers the reader a
view of the modern city as complex as his subject matter. Here the
methodologies and knowledge generated by the social sciences are
both complemented and subverted by the experience of city life as
portrayed in literature. With its diverse narrative tactics and
shifting points of view, which can be as disorienting to the reader
as a foreign city is to an arriving immigrant, literature
reinforces the importance of method and outlook in the social
sciences. Ultimately, Ahearn suggests, neither literature nor the
social sciences can capture the experience of urban misery.
In an innovative contribution to the challenging of disciplinary
boundaries, Edward J. Ahearn juxtaposes works of literature with
the writings of social scientists to discover how together they
illuminate city life in ways that neither can accomplish
separately. Ahearn's argument spans from the second half of the
nineteenth century in Western Europe to the present-day United
States and encompasses a wide range of literary genres and
sociological schools. For example, Charles Baudelaire's essays on
the city are viewed alongside the work of Emile Durkheim and Georg
Simmel; Bertolt Brecht's Jungle of Cities heightens the arguments
of Louis Wirth and Robert Park; Richard Wright's Native Son and
Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March are re-visioned in
tandem with works by William Julius Wilson and others; Herman
Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" poses a challenge to James Q.
Wilson's Bureaucracy; Toni Morrison's historical novel Jazz is
buttressed by the career of Robert Moses and the revisionist work
of historians Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson; and Don
DeLillos's Cosmopolis comes into brilliant focus in the light of
arguments on world cybercities by David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and
Manuel Cassels. Resisting the temptation to ignore contradictions
for the sake of interpretation, Ahearn instead offers the reader a
view of the modern city as complex as his subject matter. Here the
methodologies and knowledge generated by the social sciences are
both complemented and subverted by the experience of city life as
portrayed in literature. With its diverse narrative tactics and
shifting points of view, which can be as disorienting to the reader
as a foreign city is to an arriving immigrant, literature
reinforces the importance of method and outlook in the social
sciences. Ultimately, Ahearn suggests, neither literature nor the
social sciences can capture the experience of urban misery.
"Visionary" writers, says Edward Ahearn in this original book, seek
a personal way to explode the normal experience of the "real,"
using prophetic visions, fantastic tales, insane rantings,
surrealistic dreams, and drug- or sex-induced dislocations in their
work. Their fiction expresses rebellion against all the values of
Western civilization-personal, sexual, familial, religious, moral,
societal, and political. Yet even though they are anti-realistic,
they do react to specific aspects of modern reality, such as the
recurring promise and failure of social revolution. Ahearn, who
finds this form at once exhilarating, immensely disturbing, vital,
and subversive, explores the work of a wide variety of authors who
have contributed to the genre from the late eighteenth century to
the present day. Beginning with the appearance of visionary writing
in the work of William Blake, Ahearn traces the development of the
form in texts by widely scattered authors writing in French,
German, and English. He includes Novalis, Lautreamont, Breton,
William Burroughs, and contemporary feminists Monique Wittig and
Jamaica Kincaid, among others. Quoting liberally from these
authors, Ahearn summarizes the works and places them in context.
General readers, as well as those who have studied these authors,
will find this book an extraordinarily interesting tour of this
little recognized and frequently misunderstood genre.
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