Picturing the City
Picturing the City

Author: Rebecca Zurier

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2006-09-06

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 0520220188

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"Zurier vividly locates the Ashcan School artists within the early twentieth-century crosscurrents of newspaper journalism, literary realism, illustration, sociology, and urban spectatorship. Her compassionate study newly assesses the artists' rejection of 'genteel' New York, their alignments with mass media, and their innovative ways of seeing in the modern city."—Wanda M. Corn, author of The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915-35 If the Ashcan School brought a special and embracing eye to the city, Rebecca Zurier in her richly contextual and impressively interdisciplinary book explains and evokes that historically specific urban vision in all its richness. Finally, in Picturing the City, we have the study these painters have long deserved. And we gain new and delightful access to New York City at the moment of its emergence as a compelling embodiment of metropolitan modernity."—Thomas Bender, Director, International Center for Advanced Studies, New York University "Picturing the City is both meticulous and wide-ranging in its assessment of the Ashcan artists and their passionate efforts to represent New York. It charts their pleasures and problems, warmth and prejudices, generosity and differences, originality and formula. It takes seriously their habits as journalists and provides the most complete sense of their immersion in a world of urban spectatorship and vision. Rebecca Zurier has written a wonderful, timely book that will be a benchmark for any future discussions of them."—Anthony W. Lee, author of Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco "Rebecca Zurier takes us on an intellectually exhilarating and breathtakingly beautiful visual voyage through turn-of-the-century New York City as the Ashcan painters saw it. As we watch them learn a new way of looking in the commercially dynamic, sensual New York of a century ago, we too see that time and place with fresh eyes. Inevitably, thanks to Zurier, the way we look at city life today will change as well."—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers' Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America

The Invisible Flâneuse?
The Invisible Flâneuse?

Author: Aruna D'Souza

Publisher: Manchester University Press

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 208

ISBN-13: 9780719067846

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"This collection of essays revisits gender and urban modernity in nineteenth-century Paris in the wake of changes to the fabric of the city and social life. In rethinking the figure of the flâneur, the contributors apply the most current thinking in literature and urban studies to an examination of visual culture of the period, including painting, caricature, illustrated magazines, and posters. Using a variety of approaches, the collection re-examines the long-held belief that life in Paris was divided according to strict gender norms, with men free to roam in public space while women were restricted to the privacy of the domestic sphere." http://www.loc.gov/catdir/enhancements/fy0743/2007533305-d.html.

After-images of the City
After-images of the City

Author: Joan Ramon Resina

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 9780801487897

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Criticism on the textual and iconographic construction of the city is extensive, yet the problem of historical change in representations of "the urban" has received little attention. Believing traditional accounts are limited by their reflection of a specific historical moment, Joan Ramon Resina and Dieter Ingenschay focus, by contrast, on transition. In essays written for this volume, scholars of literary and visual studies, the history of architecture, cultural theory, and urban geography explore the ways perceptual or conceptual paradigms of the city supersede or replace others, while at the same time retaining the "after-image" of what went before. The writers touch on a wide variety of issues related to contemporary urban cultures as they journey through cities including New York, Barcelona, Madrid, Paris, Tijuana, Berlin, and London. Drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin, Camilo José Cela, Honoré de Balzac, and Alfred Stieglitz, their approach is broadly cultural rather than technical. After-Images of the City takes into account the intrinsic instability of the image and reveals that representations of the modern metropolis cannot be fixed in time and history.

The Urban Condition
The Urban Condition

Author: Ghent Urban Studies Team

Publisher: 010 Publishers

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 9789064503559

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What does the Western city at the end of the twentieth century look like? How did the modern metropolis of congestion and density turn into a posturban or even postsuburban cityscape? What are edge cities and technoburbs? How has the social composition of cities changed in the postwar era? What do gated communities tell us about social fragmentation? Is public space in the contemporary city being privatized and militarized? How can the urban self still be defined? What role does consumer aestheticism have to play in this? These and many more questions are addressed by this uniquely conceived multidisciplinary study. The Urban Condition seeks to interfere in current debates over the future and interpretation of our urban landscapes by reuniting studies of the city as a physical and material phenomenon and as a cultural and mental (arte)fact. The Ghent Urban Studies Team responsible for the writing and editing of this volume is directed by Kristiaan Versluys and Dirk De Meyer at the University of Ghent, Belgium. It is an interdisciplinary research team of young academics that further consists of Kristiaan Borret, Bart Eeckhout, Steven Jacobs, and Bart Keunen. The collective expertise of GUST ranges from architectural theory, urban planning, and art history to philosophy, literary criticism and cultural theory.