Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science, 1848-2001

European Contexts, American Evolutions

Edward J. Ahearn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754668824
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317003960
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Index

All index entries shown here correspond to the page numbers within the printed edition only. Within this digital format these page numbers allow for cross referencing only.

absurd, the 3, 52

accomodationism 69, 147

Adventures of Augie March (Bellow) 3, 17, 19, 67, 71–2, 74, 93–112

Augie’s pursuit of fate in 102–3, 105

Chicago in 94, 95, 97–8, 100, 103–5, 106, 107–8, 112

crime in 96, 97, 99, 100, 101–2

detailed narrative of 94, 96, 97, 102

education in 94, 95, 96, 97, 100–102

Einhorn 97, 99, 100, 102

family in 94–6, 100

Five Properties 93, 94, 96, 97, 104

Grandma Lausch 94–6, 97, 100

as Great American Novel 3, 68, 72

Great Books in 5, 100, 101, 109

Jewish elements of 94

Mexican episode 97, 101, 105, 106–7

and Native Son 93, 99, 110, 112

Paris in 93, 98, 112

personal identity in 93

psychology in 98–9, 102

race in 95, 104–5, 109

religion in 96

sexuality in 95, 96, 102, 103, 104–6

and sociology 96, 102, 103

success in 94, 95, 96, 99, 104, 112

wartime episode 108

work in 94, 96, 97–100, 101–2

African-American novels 4

see also Jazz; Native Son

agencies 124–5, 128, 133, 141, 142–3, 192

alienation 13, 14, 31, 34, 47, 51, 134–5, 146, 179, 200

from nature ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Permissions
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Breaking the Glass
• I THE HEROISM OF MODERN LIFE? BAUDELAIRE, BRECHT AND THE FOUNDERS OF URBAN SOCIOLOGY
• II CHICAGO BLACK AND WHITE: IMMIGRATION AND RACE IN NATIVE SON AND THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH
• III POWER, GOVERNANCE AND THE STRUGGLE FOR HUMAN REALIZATION
• Epilogue: DeLillo’s Global City
• Bibliography
• Index