scholarly journals Don DeLillo’s Mapping of the City

2005 ◽  
Vol 2 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 127-137 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stipe Grgas
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Don Delillo ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
American City ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Late Capitalism ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The City ◽  
Point Of Departure

Taking as his point of departure the immense significance the city has for understanding the present moment and the special relationship the city has had with the novel, the author gives a reading of Don DeLillo and the way his work has engaged the city of New York. Focusing upon his last two novels, Underworld and Cosmopolis, the author describes how these two novels narrate the transformations the American city has undergone during the second part of the twentieth century. The bulk of his analysis deals with the function the Prologue flashback of the Bronx has in the earlier novel and the transformed city of late capitalism in his last text. The author concludes his reading by pointing out how DeLillo’s novels not only provide fictional accounts of what has occurred in the urban sphere but how they provide evidence of the difficulty of representing the contemporary world and how they foreground urgent political considerations.

scholarly journals The image of New York in the context of the criminal world in the novel „The Godfather” by M. Puzo

2020 ◽  
pp. 104-112
Author(s):  
D. Yu. Boklakh ◽  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Linguistic Context ◽  
Objective World ◽  
Local Areas ◽  
Temporal And Spatial ◽  
The City

The work identifies the features of the artistic worldview of urban reality by the author, which is associated with the reproduction of the criminal sphere of life in New York in the middle of the twentieth century. It was found that the compositional center and background of events in the work is the image of the city, which becomes a sensotvir dominant, forms a system of local areas mainly without detailed action in time. The image of the city is perceived in the imagination of the explicit recipient, obeys the author’s intention and consciously follows it, becoming a passive observer. The author’s assessment of the reproduction of the objective world of the city is absent. The construction of temporal and spatial elements occurs through the retrospection of the narrator. New York is becoming a certified reflection of the life of the mafia world, full of social vices and an idle lifestyle. The sensual sphere of the city is full of immorality, the prosperity of crime, and the mercantile interests of residents. The linguistic context of reproducing the image of the city is indicated by modeling a kind of chronicle with a lexically monotonous text, created through the use of newspaper and telegraph stylistics.

scholarly journals Teju Cole's Nigeria and the open cities of New York and Brussels

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 3-11
Author(s):  
Igor Maver
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Violence ◽  
Past Experiences ◽  
The City

The novel Open City (2011) by the Nigerian-born and raised author Teju Cole isset in New York City, where he has lived since 1992. The narrator and protagonist of the book, the young Nigerian doctor Julius in is a veritable flâneur in the Big Apple, who is observing the rapidly changing multiethnic character of the city and meditating on (his) history and culture, identity and solitude, and the world beyond the United States, with which it is interconnected through the global history of violence and pain. He is juxtaposing the past and the present, the seemingly borderless open city of New York, Nigeria, and the various European locales, particularly Brussels.Thenovel, although set in the United States, is constantly interspersed with his recollections of his past experiences conditioned by hiscomplex hybrid Nigerian-European-American identity.

scholarly journals Children of “Toxic Parents”: An Attempt of Interpretation of “The Unconsoled” by Kazuo Ishiguro

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. 281-301
Author(s):  
Barbara Myrdzik
Keyword(s):  
The Novel ◽  
Kazuo Ishiguro ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Professional Success ◽  
Life Problems ◽  
The World ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Professional Fulfillment ◽  
The City

The article constitutes an attempt to interpret the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro The Unconsoled – a work with a complex plot and a multi-threaded structure, typical for a composition stretched on the frame of the rhizome-like labyrinth and the motif of memory imperfections. The labyrinth is a space of strangeness, of being lost. It is a journey of the main character who wanders around various spaces of the city and hotel (which performs a variety of functions), meets many random people and listens to their accounts. The life problems of the city’s inhabitants indicate the eternal truth, according to which a man cannot live without understanding, without talking to someone kind who has the ability to listen. They were looking for someone who would listen and understand them, someone who would kindly respond to their problems. It may also be assumed that living in a world without the feeling of a lack of transcendence, the inhabitants were looking for an authority like a messiah who would indicate the direction of renewal in the world of chaos and who would answer the question: How to live? The novel describes a cultural crisis triggered by the feeling of a fundamental contradiction between the world of scientific truths and the inner world of every human being. Values such as faith, friendship, selflessness, truthfulness or family, to which Ishiguro pays a lot of attention, have been lost. “Toxic parents” are shown in multiple configurations: on the example of Ryder’s parents, or Ryder himself as the father of Boris and Stephan Hoffman. The author shows one of the major causes of the paternity crisis, namely the cult of professional success. Professional success and rivalry connected with it completely absorb Ryder’s life and activities. As a result of the pursuit of professional fulfillment, the role of emotional ties in his life becomes less significant, they almost disappear. It may be assumed that, using the example of the crisis in the described city, Ishiguro presents the contemporary world, which lost the sense of life; however, he did not limit it to the lost past. The world in which all attempts to search for a new form of expression and valorization end in failure. It is a labyrinthine, objectified world which is only given outside, a world of showing off and a “game” of pretending, without honesty and simplicity. It is a place dominated by a pose and culture of narcissism, full of inauthenticity, artificiality and appearance. In addition, The Unconsoled is a poignant novel about human loneliness.

City of Losers, Losing City

2019 ◽  
pp. 86-100
Author(s):  
Heather Hendershot
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
York City ◽  
Crime Rates ◽  
American City ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
The City

In 1965, when John Lindsay was elected mayor of New York City, “the ungovernable city” was spiraling economically, and crime rates were on the rise. That same year, only two major films were shot on location in New York. Just two years later, in 1967, forty-two features were shot in the city, for one straightforward reason: the Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting. One actor embodied the New Hollywood vision of the city: Al Pacino. This chapter engages with Pacino’s films of this era—spanning from Panic in Needle Park to Cruising, with Dog Day Afternoon as centerpiece—to examine how New York City, which came to symbolize all that was wrong with the American city in the troubled 1970s.

The Billboard and the Garden: A Struggle for Roots

Naked City ◽  
2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Zukin
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Real Point ◽  
State Governments ◽  
Vacant Lots ◽  
Green Beans ◽  
Saturday Morning ◽  
Subway Train ◽  
Red Hook ◽  
The City ◽  
Point Of Departure

The weather is unusually warm for a Saturday morning in mid-October, and the clear horizon of the sky stretches blue and wide above this distant patch of Brooklyn. To the southeast, high above the elevated subway tracks, a jet plane climbs on the first part of its journey, away from Kennedy Airport in Queens, its real point of departure, but also far away from the two-story, redbrick houses and vacant lots of East New York, long known as one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City. When you get out of the subway train at Van Siclen Avenue and walk down the stairs from the elevated tracks, you feel a bit lost in the shadows and the absence of shops, except for a small corner bodega, on the quiet street. But a short, smiling woman in her sixties, who gets off the train with you, sees that you don’t look black or Hispanic and senses that you don’t live in the neighborhood; she invites you to walk with her. Improbably, on the next block, almost directly under the tracks, three lush, green gardens, carefully tended and fenced, come into view. Inside, planted in neat rows, green beans and mint wait to be picked. Small onions peek through the earth, ready to be dug before the first frost. A few peppers fl ash slivers of bright red through the leaves of tomato and squash plants that have already seen the last harvest of the year. These oases represent the time and effort of a small number of community gardeners who live in the neighborhood. Since the 1990s they have been created and maintained by the gardeners’ hard work and earnest planning, both subsidized and jeopardized by the city and state governments; like the Red Hook food vendors, they are a tangible symbol of the constant struggle to put down roots in the city, especially if you don’t have much money. The helpful woman whom you have just met invites you to visit one of the gardens, a small lot of about one-third of an acre.

Supermarket Sociology

Site Reading ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 25-48
Author(s):  
David J. Alworth
Keyword(s):  
Don Delillo ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Social Forces ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Social ◽  
Deep Significance ◽  
A Site ◽  
Nonhuman Agency ◽  
Point Of Departure

Taking Latour's engagement with the literary as a point of departure, this chapter offers a new model for thinking between the disciplines of literary studies and sociology. At the crux of this model is a site, the supermarket, that dramatizes nonhuman agency as a mundane yet complex fact of social experience—a fact that Latour theorizes throughout his writings and that a host of literary authors, above all Don DeLillo, have sought to explore in different ways. It offers a reading of the novel in terms of Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) and demonstrates how a site that is crucial to both the novelist and the sociologist can facilitate a new interdisciplinary conversation, a mode of inquiry that would divert from a more traditional sociology of literature whose objective would be to identify the deep significance of literary form in the social forces that subtend aesthetic production.

New York City’s Reuse Impact Calculator: Quantifying the zero waste impact of materials reuse

2018 ◽  
Vol 36 (12) ◽  
pp. 1190-1200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorena M Fortuna ◽  
Marco J Castaldi
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Waste Reduction ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Waste Prevention ◽  
Quantitative Understanding ◽  
Product Reuse ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

In 2015, the city of New York (NYC) introduced a plan to reduce the volume of collected solid waste by 90% by 2030 and envisioned the expansion of reuse opportunities as one of its main drivers. The assessment of the contributions from reuse initiatives to the advancement of waste prevention and waste reduction goals requires a quantitative understanding of the scope of reuse activities. The high population density in NYC and well-organised collection efforts by The City of New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY) (DSNY) have resulted in a structure that enables the informal sector to readily contribute and access the reuse market. Importantly, the scale of the operations in NYC enable the results found to be a model for other municipalities of similar size. This article presents the Reuse Impact Calculator, developed from the need to automate and quantify the environmental impact of product reuse by nonprofit enterprises in NYC. Specifically, we will explain the development process, show the novel characteristics of this calculator, describe the software in terms of data input, auto mapping functionality and calculations and present a case study to demonstrate the implementation of the Reuse Impact Calculator. This calculator is a dynamic and easily modifiable tool that converts diverse datasets to comparable conditions and allows the assessment of the impact of reuse organisations to waste prevention in NYC.

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