Text and the City
Text and the City

Author: Ai Maeda

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2004-03-25

Total Pages: 412

ISBN-13: 9780822333463

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Maeda Ai was a prominent literary critic and an influential public intellectual in late-twentieth-century Japan. Text and the City is the first book of his work to appear in English. A literary and cultural critic deeply engaged with European critical thought, Maeda was a brilliant, insightful theorist of modernity for whom the city was the embodiment of modern life. He conducted a far-reaching inquiry into changing conceptions of space, temporality, and visual practices as they gave shape to the city and its inhabitants. James A. Fujii has assembled a selection of Maeda’s essays that question and explore the contours of Japanese modernity and resonate with the concerns of literary and cultural studies today. Maeda remapped the study of modern Japanese literature and culture in the 1970s and 1980s, helping to generate widespread interest in studying mass culture on the one hand and marginalized sectors of modern Japanese society on the other. These essays reveal the broad range of Maeda’s cultural criticism. Among the topics considered are Tokyo; utopias; prisons; visual media technologies including panoramas and film; the popular culture of the Edo, Meiji, and contemporary periods; maps; women’s magazines; and women writers. Integrally related to these discussions are Maeda’s readings of works of Japanese literature including Matsubara Iwagoro’s In Darkest Tokyo, Nagai Kafu’s The Fox, Higuchi Ichiyo’s Growing Up, Kawabata Yasunari’s The Crimson Gang of Asakusa, and Narushima Ryuhoku’s short story “Useless Man.” Illuminating the infinitely rich phenomena of modernity, these essays are full of innovative, unexpected connections between cultural productions and urban life, between the text and the city.

The City as Text
The City as Text

Author: James S. Duncan

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9780521611961

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Argues that landscapes are not only culturally produced, but they also influence governing ideas of political and religious life.

Text and Image in the City
Text and Image in the City

Author: Catherine Armstrong

Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Published: 2017-03-07

Total Pages: 190

ISBN-13: 1443879487

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The essays in this collection discuss how the city is ‘textualized’, and address many aspects of how texts and images are written and produced in, and about, cities. They demonstrate how urban texts and images provoke reactions, in city-dwellers, visitors, civic and political actors, that, in turn, impact upon the shape of the city itself. Many kinds of urban texts – both manuscript and print – are discussed, including chapbooks, periodicals, poetry, graffiti and street-signs. The essays derive from a range of disciplines including book history, urban history, cultural history, literary studies, art history and urban planning, and explore some key questions in urban cultural history, including the relationship between text, image and the city; the function of the text or image within an urban environment; how urban texts and images have been used by those in positions of power and by those with little or no power; the ways in which urban identity and values have been reflected in ‘street literature’, graffiti and subversive texts and images; and whether theories of urban space can help us to understand the relationship between text, image and the city. As such, this volume will serve to enhance the reader’s understanding of the nature of urbanism from a historical perspective, the creation and representation of urban space, and the processes of urbanization. It investigates how the creation, distribution and consumption of urban texts and images actively affect the shaping of the city itself – a mutually constitutive process whereby text, image and city create and sustain each other.

A City in Fragments
A City in Fragments

Author: Yair Wallach

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2020-06-30

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1503611140

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In the mid-nineteenth century, Jerusalem was rich with urban texts inscribed in marble, gold, and cloth, investing holy sites with divine meaning. Ottoman modernization and British colonial rule transformed the city; new texts became a key means to organize society and subjectivity. Stone inscriptions, pilgrims' graffiti, and sacred banners gave way to street markers, shop signs, identity papers, and visiting cards that each sought to define and categorize urban space and people. A City in Fragments tells the modern history of a city overwhelmed by its religious and symbolic significance. Yair Wallach walked the streets of Jerusalem to consider the graffiti, logos, inscriptions, official signs, and ephemera that transformed the city over the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As these urban texts became a tool in the service of capitalism, nationalism, and colonialism, the affinities of Arabic and Hebrew were forgotten and these sister-languages found themselves locked in a bitter war. Looking at the writing of—and literally on—Jerusalem, Wallach offers a creative and expansive history of the city, a fresh take on modern urban texts, and a new reading of the Israel/Palestine conflict through its material culture.

The City as Photographic Text
The City as Photographic Text

Author: David William Foster

Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press

Published: 2021-11-02

Total Pages: 325

ISBN-13: 0822987643

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The City as Photographic Text offers the first comprehensive presentation of photography on São Paulo. But more than just a study of one city’s photographic legacy, this book is a manual for how to understand and talk about Latin American photography in general. Focusing on major figures and referencing widely available books of their work, David William Foster offers a unique analysis of how photographers have contributed to our understanding of the megalopolis São Paulo has become. Eschewing a conventional historical approach, Foster explores how best to interpret visual urban life. In turn, by focusing interest on the photographic text and the ways in which it creates an interpretive meaning for the city, rather than rehearsing the circumstances under which the photographs were taken, this study provides a model for productive comment on urban photography as a project of visual meaning with important artistic attributes. As a unique entry in the inventory of scholarly writing on São Paulo, The City as Photographic Text adds to our understanding of the enormous cultural significance this city holds as a world-class urban center.

Living for the City
Living for the City

Author: Donna Jean Murch

Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press

Published: 2010

Total Pages: 328

ISBN-13: 0807833762

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In this nuanced and groundbreaking history, Donna Murch argues that the Black Panther Party (BPP) started with a study group. Drawing on oral history and untapped archival sources, she explains how a relatively small city with a recent history of African

City of Trees
City of Trees

Author: Sophie Cunningham

Publisher: Text Publishing

Published: 2019-04-02

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 1925774244

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A rich and insightful collection of personal essays about life, death and our connection to the environment from bestselling Australian author Sophie Cunningham

The City of the Sun
The City of the Sun

Author: Tommaso Campanella

Publisher: Cosimo, Inc.

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 49

ISBN-13: 1602068879

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City of the Sun, written in 1602, is Tommaso Campanella's contribution to the body of literature concerned with utopia, the philosophical search for the perfect society. Campanella's utopia was based on a form of communism in which all possessions, including women and children, were shared by men. The great city was ruled by a spiritual leader named Metaphysic, whom Power, Wisdom, and Love served, overseeing all aspects of the society. Wisdom ensures that the sciences are properly taught, while Love ensures that men and women breed the most perfect children. Those with an interest in philosophy and sociology will find this book an intriguing take on the structure of an ideal society. Italian philosopher and theologian TOMMASO CAMPANELLA (1568-1639) became a monk at the age of fifteen. He was imprisoned for twenty-seven years for conspiring against the Spanish crown, and it was during this time that he wrote his most important works, including Atheismus triumphatus (1605) and Metaphysica (1609).

Living for the City
Living for the City

Author: Miles Larmer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-08-12

Total Pages: 671

ISBN-13: 1108968007

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Living for the City is a social history of the Central African Copperbelt, considered as a single region encompassing the neighbouring mining regions of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The Haut Katanga and Zambian Copperbelt mine towns have been understood as the vanguard of urban 'modernity' in Africa. Observers found in these towns new African communities that were experiencing what they wrongly understood as a transition from rural 'traditional' society – stable, superstitious and agricultural – to an urban existence characterised by industrial work discipline, the money economy and conspicuous consumption, Christianity, and nuclear families headed by male breadwinners supported by domesticated housewives. Miles Larmer challenges this representation of Copperbelt society, presenting an original analysis which integrates the region's social history with the production of knowledge about it, shaped by both changing political and intellectual contexts and by Copperbelt communities themselves. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

From Cows to Concrete
From Cows to Concrete

Author: Rachel Surls

Publisher: Angel City Press

Published: 2016-05-14

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781626400313

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What? Los Angeles was the original wine country of California, leading the state's wine production for more than a century? Los Angeles County was the agricultural center of North America until the 1950s? And where today's freeways soar, cows calmly chewed their cud? How could that be? Los Angeles, the capital of asphalt and Klieg lights, was once a paradise filled with grapevines and bovines, so abundant with Nature's gifts that no one could imagine a more pastoral place? Los Angeles County was the center of an agricultural empire. Today, it is the nation's most populous urban metropolis. What happened? Where did the green go? As Americans connect with gardens, farmers markets, and urban farms, most are unaware that each of these activities have deep roots in Los Angeles, and that the healthy food they savor literally had its roots in L.A. This book is for all who treasure the country's agrarian history.