Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001
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A01=Edward J. Ahearn
AC Electrical Grid
age
ahead
augie
Augie March
Author_Edward J. Ahearn
Bad Glazier
Balzac
Bartleby's Refusal
Bartleby’s Refusal
Category=DS
Category=DSBH
city life representation
comparative literature analysis
cosmopolis
dark
Dead Letter Office
DeLillo's Cosmopolis
delillos
Dense
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
Eric Packer
Girl Friend
Golden Gray
III's Paris
III’s Paris
interdisciplinary urban studies
International Monetary Fund
La Belle
Le Colonel Chabert
Le Mauvais Vitrier
Le Spleen De Paris
literary urbanism
literature and social science interaction
march
Melville's Story
Morrison's Jazz
Morrison’s Jazz
native
Native Son
Prose Poem
saskia
social theory application
son
Superb
Triborough Bridge
urban sociology
Wirth's Essay
Wirth’s Essay
Young Man
Product details
- ISBN 9781138266049
- Weight: 460g
- Dimensions: 156 x 234mm
- Publication Date: 15 Nov 2016
- Publisher: Taylor & Francis Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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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.
Edward J. Ahearn is University Professor and Professor of Comparative Literature and French Studies at Brown University, USA. He has received the Workman and Harbison awards for teaching, and held Fulbright and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships. His publications include Rimbaud, Visions and Habitations, Marx and Modern Fiction, and Visionary Fictions: Apocalyptic Writing from Blake to the Modern
