New York and Toronto Novels after Postmodernism: Explorations of the Urban by Caroline Rosenthal (review)

Cities are hard to define, because they are both imagined communities, based on abstract notions, and material realities. Major cities in North America signify specific things to their inhabitants and observers. There are few comparative studies of major cities in the United States and Canada. Caroline Rosenthal’s New York and Toronto Novels after Postmodernism: Explorations of the Urban engages the major cities of New York and Toronto in order to reveal the ways in which fictional characters negotiate urban life and express their urban experiences. This comparative study has three major goals: to explore how national space is imagined in terms of symbolic landscapes and canon formation in the United States and Canada; to delineate how space may be conceptualized in terms of the urban experience; and to offer literary analyses of contemporary novels that reflect how the cities of New York and Toronto are realistically understood by city dwellers and by outsiders. Rosenthal is particularly interested in the often overlooked feminine gaze and the private spaces of the city that go unnoticed. She emphasizes that her study “aims at closing some of these gaps by looking at urban texts by women writers of diverse ethnicities who react in politically and aesthetically diverse ways to the city in the period after postmodernism,” when specific novels characterize the city not as a system of signs but as a confluence of urban experiences that rewrite spatial metanarratives (8).

In her initial chapter, “Imagining National Space: Symbolic Landscapes and National Canons,” Rosenthal provides an overview of the national narratives that have influenced the literature of the United States and Canada. She stresses that North American narratives of nation formation are expressed in terms of people’s relationship to the land. The question becomes whether one has mastery over the land or if the land has mastery over all. Canadian narratives reflect the theme of survival against a harsh landscape, while US narratives express a manifest destiny and the themes of subduing and conquering the land. City fiction took root during the modernist period as cities grew in the United States. But in Canada city fiction took much longer to flourish, as Canadian literature held to the survivalist motif and preoccupied itself with the small towns in its many provinces. Rosenthal views New York and Toronto as telling cities that reflect how urban literature is best represented in the two countries. Immigration in/to both transnational cities exposes the flaws, challenges, and contradictions of national narratives more than other major cities in North America. Rosenthal astutely points out that, in literary studies, New York represents the American Dream, while Toronto signifies the multicultural ideals of the nation-state. She regards Toronto fiction as especially important to the development of a Canadian canon that more accurately reflects Canadian spaces as it breaks free from the dominance of British and US literary traditions. Ultimately, for Rosenthal, New York and Toronto novels provide a way for those who were excluded from founding spatial narratives of North America to influence national narratives.

The second chapter of Rosenthal’s work, “Articulating Urban Space: Spatial Politics and Difference,” initially offers summaries of leading theories of space by thinkers such as Henri Lefèbvre, Michel Foucault, and Edward Soja. Noting the “spatial turn in the humanities and the cultural turn in geography,” she turns to how the specificities of urban space are linked to general notions of spatialization and of social practices within the nation (55). Citing urban theorists such as Sharon Zukin, Rob Shields, and Nan Ellin, Rosenthal summarizes different theories of urban space. She ultimately concludes that the “city is a metaphor and synecdoche for the nation, but at the same time it is a place where the specters of the nation, the repressed, the excluded, and the uncanny—the unhomely within the home of the nation—surface” (56). When these specters surface, they reimagine, reproduce, and rewrite the city. Literature that reflects this process also reconceptualizes...