Parsing the city

We encounter one of Edgar Allan Poe’s proto-detectives, the narrator of his short story “The Man of the Crowd,” as he recalls a singular urban experience that began while he was sitting in the window of a London coffee house. On this occasion he was amusing himself with, alternately, poring over a newspaper and observing the “dense and continuous tides of population” streaming past his vantage point. ¹ His view of the urban throng, and especially his glimpse of one particularly fascinating city specimen, eventually prompt him to plunge into the streets of the great metropolis in pursuit of this mysterious character so as “to know more of him.” His deeper, though unrecognized goal seems to be to make some sense out of the chaos of the new industrial city, with the object of his pursuit and surveillance as a kind of emblematic denizen of this unprecedented environment. ²

In what I assume is an unintended parallel, we first encounter Rick Deckard, the protagonist of Ridley Scott’s 1982 dystopian noir-pastiche film Blade Runner, as he sits reading the newspaper and waiting for service at a curb-side “noodle bar” in a nightmarish future Los Angeles. ³ Like his mid-nineteenth century counterpart, he is confronted with a dense tide of motley humanity streaming by in front of him. And soon he too will find himself compelled to wander the night streets of a great metropolis in the effort to resolve ambiguities that go well beyond the immediate circumstances of the case assigned to him. One further parallel between these two widely separate moments in the history of urban representation is that neither investigator is entirely successful in his attempts to uncover the city’s deepest secrets.

What most prompts me to point out the faint echo between these texts is that in both cases two fundamental modes of urban experience are referenced: reading reports on the city, especially as the location of commerce, exchange, and commodity relations (newspaper advertisements are referred to in both cases), and direct experience of the city’s material reality by walking its streets and encountering its diversity face to face. In Urban Verbs Kevin R. McNamara is concerned mainly with textual representations of the city. But even though his focus is on how the city as a whole has been imagined and represented in American culture, he is also obviously very much concerned with how we actually encounter cities as lived places, and with distinguishing between better and worse ways of relating to urban environments. In other words, a moral economy is at work in this study and the author is himself clearly a partisan for one of the two broad traditions he identifies in his reading of diverse texts from the modern history of urban representation. Though far from polemical, that Urban Verbs reflects a particular urban ethos means that it helps us think about cities as actual places to be encountered and inhabited, and not just about “floating” discourses detached from concrete experience.

Poe’s short story and Scott’s film fall outside the far and near boundaries, respectively, of the period McNamara examines. He is concerned with the epoch marked at one end by the post-bellum rise of the fully industrial modern city and at the other by the decline of that urban form in the face of postindustrial economic shifts and suburban and “post-urban” demographic trends. Representations of the great industrial cities of the East and Midwest, most prominently New York and Chicago, take center stage.

The general method of Urban Verbs is very much in the classic American studies tradition. The author assembles an eclectic set of texts from varied cultural domains, genres, and historical contexts and reads out from them a coherent structure of cultural practice that spans a substantial stretch of American history, in this case the century of high modernism. Although most of the works examined in this volume can fairly be described as the products of elite Modernist...