On the Description of Cityscape in Novels Written by Zhang Ailing (Eileen Chang)

Zhang Ailing captures and describes various cityscapes with fierce and exquisite style. These “-scapes” not only exist as the carrier of urban civilization, but also demonstrate the looks of Shanghai’s people from all walks of life. The “-scapes” represented by apparels entail pessimistic life philosophy and connotate the emotional experience and fate of characters. Architectures, as time-markers, are shaped in the macro background of the era sensitively and organically. As for sounds, they can not only strengthen the daily space constructed by Zhang Ailing because of their inherent natural attributes, but also vividly depict the living things in the form of hearing. All kinds of “-scapes”, such as apparels, architectures, and sounds, whether fleeting or continuous, have been polished into an indispensable form in Zhang Ailing's urban writing. They are scattered all over the city and bear the unique literary significance organically and completely.

“That city, that self”:

This article traces a historical trajectory of the city poet in Canada—a writer whose “street-level perspective” defines their methods and shapes their authorial personae—from the nineteenth-century through to the twenty-first. It first provides a brief exploration of some of the literature published in the Toronto Evening Telegram newspaper in the 1880s and 1890s to consider the origins of a literary tradition and an authorial persona rooted in the city. This part of the article uses the example of Robert Kirkland Kernighan to show the way early writers exploited the opportunity provided by city newspapers and the city itself to map and define themselves in artistic and professional terms. The article goes on to consider the work of contemporary city writers like Bren Simmers, who continue mapping themselves onto the street in sometimes deeply personal and increasingly unsettled ways. At base, the article argues that by extending critical discussions of urban writing back to its nineteenth-century roots, we can better understand how the city works as a unique marketplace for literature and a unique cultural economy through which literature circulates, but also as a unique context for the creation of authorial identity.

Walking Margaret Harkness’s London

Margaret Harkness’s London is a city of mobility, both local and global. In her fiction, she utilises a familiar trope in late nineteenth-century urban writing, the figure of the peripatetic protagonist, in order to produce a complex urban panorama. This chapter considers perspectives on the city in Out of Work and In Darkest London from the viewpoints of two kinds of urban walkers: the slum saviour and the unemployed man. It explores the formal conventions wrought by this exploration of viewpoints, most notably, a shift from progressive to episodic narrative development.

'n Boer in beton: "Hierdie huis" deur Kleinboer

This review article is an attempt to interpret and evaluate the novel Hierdie huis within a specific context, namely that of urban writing. This is done first and foremost with reference to Afrikaans literature, but also in a wider context with reference to English South African literature (e.g. Ivan Vladislavic) and to relevant theories like that of the city dweller (flâneur) in the critical writings of Walter Benjamin. In recent Dutch literature several novels have been published (amongst others by Marc Reugebrink and Ilja Leonard Pfeijffer) that share certain motifs and strategies with Kleinboer’s trilogy and they are discussed in greater detail. In this article the focus is on this third novel in what ostensibly is a coherent trilogy or prose cycle and not primarily a rejection of the traditional Afrikaans farm novel as often is asserted by literary critics; in actual fact it is a creative renewal of this genre, although often in a parodical fashion. In conclusion this novel is described as typical of “metamodernism” in its quest for meaningful moral and philosophical “master” narratives, rejected in postmodernism. In this novel the main character recognizes The Other as a fellow human-being and his etymological quests stresses hybridity which implies that linguistic (or racial) purity is a farce. Postcolonial métissage is central in this novel and the conclusion is that the forming of new identities has seldom (or never) been described in Afrikaans literature as in this trilogy.

Writing Urban Crisis after Moynihan

This chapter explores literary responses to the late 1960s crisis in participatory professionalism, provoked by the period’s race riots and by conservatives’ successful appropriation of liberal poverty discourse. The chapter focuses on two texts that address the Community Action Program: Joyce Carol Oates’s them and Tom Wolfe’s Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers. While these texts voice opposing political positions, both distrust white liberal efforts to speak for the ghetto, drawing on traditions of urban writing (naturalism and literary journalism) that resist the process imperative to break down barriers between author, audience, and lower-class subject matter. At the same time, both writers complicate their literary objectivity by incorporating aspects of the very participatory professionalism they seek to delimit.

A cidade dos anjos do improrrogável / The city of the angels of unextendable

ResumoA cidade tem sido objeto de inúmeras escritas. Escrevem maldizendo-a os desertores que rumam às suas casas no campo ou às suas comunidades autossustentáveis. Escrevem clamando por ela os ocupados nas escolas, nos prédios abandonados, nas praças, nas universidades. Escrevem preocupados os economistas com suas sacras probabilidades. O que torna improrrogável que escrevamos a cidade? Perseguindo esta interrogação, colocamos em cena um personagem interpelado por uma voz que o exorta a caminhar pelas ruas de um Rio de Janeiro que lhe desorienta os sentidos intoxicados de confortáveis certezas. Em seguida pensamos tal processo à luz do materialismo filosófico de Epicuro e Lucrécio, com vistas à proposição de uma escrita urbana que não apenas interpreta fenômenos urbanos, mas que, transgredindo o sensível, inventa cidades e subjetividades.Palavras-chave: Cidade; Escrita; Materialismo Filosófico. AbstractThe city has been object of countless writings. Cursing it write the deserters while depart to its country houses or self-sustainable communities. Claiming for it write the occupiers at schools, abandoned buildings, parks, universities. Concerned write the economists with its sacred probabilities. What makes unextendable that we write the city? On this quest we screened a character haunted by a voice which urges him to walk on the Rio de Janeiro’s streets that disorientates his senses intoxicated by comfortable certainties. On the following we analyze this process by the light of the Epicurus and Lucretius’ philosophical materialism, aiming to propose an urban writing that doesn’t interpret urban phenomena but transgressing the senses creates cities and subjectivities.Keywords: City; Writing; Philosophical Materialism.

Why diachronicity matters in the study of linguistic landscapes

It is commonly argued that the proliferation of urban writing known as linguistic landscapes represents “a thoroughly contemporary global trend” (Coupland, 2010: 78). The purpose of this paper is to show that linguistic landscapes are by no means modern phenomena and to draw on our shared interest in multilingual empires to highlight the importance of diachronic inquiry and productive dialog between sociolinguists of modern and ancient societies. We will argue that while signs do operate in aggregate, the common focus on all signs at a single point in time on one street is problematic because the interpretation of signs is diachronic in nature, intrinsically linked to the preceding signs in the same environment and to related signs elsewhere, and the process of reading “back from signs to practices to people” (Blommaert, 2013: 51) is not as unproblematic as it is sometimes made to look.