Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848–2001: European Contexts, American Evolutions by Edward Ahearn (review)

Since recorded history, humanity has built cities and pushed their frontiers horizontally and vertically, fighting itself and nature in the process. From Biblical stories of the Tower of Babel, through lawless Wild West towns, to speculative fiction about outer space habitats from authors like Neal Stephenson, we continually seek to congregate and interact but also to struggle. Cities of the early twenty-first century—especially coastal metropolises like Bangladesh, Mumbai, and Tokyo—will be the battleground for our attempts to adapt to global warming. This innovative and ambitious book shows how our writing on urban spaces—both fictional accounts and systemized inquiry—can "make strange" our assumptions and bring out "vital versions of contemporary human experience" (10). By bringing together literature and social science, Edward Ahearn makes real cross-disciplinary connections and shows all of us a way forward in the field of urban studies.

Cities provide liminal spaces for creative encounters, exposing us to new ideas and approaches. They also bring pathologies: choking population density, inequitable housing conditions, illegal immigration, racial discrimination and conflict, poor governance, and violence (3, 29, 165). Popular literature, such as Charles Baudelaire's "The Bad Glazier," embodies the "tense urban psychology and misdirected violence" (2) present not just in the foul back alleys of nineteenth-century Paris but also in more recent events such as the riots that broke out in South Central Los Angeles following the trial of police officers accused of beating Rodney King. Social science recognizes these social ills and seeks their causes not only in individual choices but also in societal frameworks, institutional path dependence, and theories of norms and shared behaviors. However, attempts in social science to infer causal pathways may not always resonate effectively with the lived experiences embodied in fiction. Indeed, as one of my editors pointed out, we social scientists have a way of draining the interest from critical events. Further, most social science classes stick within their lanes, reading relevant literature written by colleagues and assigning in their classes articles and books safely within the recognized field. Similarly, literature and language courses rarely integrate social science in a serious way. This book accelerates urban studies by selecting and pairing works from both disciplines. Urban Confrontations explodes standard ways of tackling urban problems by wrapping deep readings of literature with references to social science.

By contrasting Bertolt Brecht's work In the Jungle of Cities with Kathryn Neckerman's research on poverty and physically exhausting labor, we gain a better understanding of the experiences of Brecht's characters Shlink and George Garga and our society's class structure more broadly. Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener rubs against James Q. Wilson's Thinking about Crime and Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish to show how personal agency can collide with institutional frameworks. Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street and DeLeon's Left Coast City tell similar stories of immigration, economics, and struggle but in radically different languages. Richard Wright's Native Son tells the gripping and tragic tale of one black man "seized with a violent urge to destruction" (84); imposed on William J. Wilson's The Truly Disadvantaged both show us the societal and political factors creating racism, classism, and division in America. Throughout this text, Ahearn has masterfully selected novels, prose, and social science that together drive home their shared messages to broader audiences. He also approaches the literature sympathetically and as a chance for a sort of confession, recognizing that the poor choices, cruelty, and violence may not be so far removed from our own lives. While he recognizes the criticisms made by feminist and post-colonialist critics of authors like Baudelaire (47), he sees them as insightful and compelling. Further, he admits to the "need to suppress a guilty chuckle" at the "misdirected urban warfare" seen in "The Bad Glazier" (32) and the "profoundly disturbing, more terribly revealing" elements in Brecht (64).

The book...