Charting Literary Urban Studies

Jens Martin Gurr is Professor of British and Anglophone Literature and Culture at the University of Duisburg-Essen. He has 12 years of research experience in the field of Literary Urban Studies with five edited collections and some 30 essays in this field alone. As Director of the interdisciplinary Joint Centre Urban Systems at the University of Duisburg-Essen and Speaker of the Competence Field Metropolitan Research in the University Alliance Ruhr, he has directed and co-directed numerous disciplinary and interdisciplinary research projects.

• ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Interdisciplinary Urban Complexity Research and Texts as Qualitative Models Literary Models of Urban Complexity and the Problem of Simultaneity: A Sketchy Inventory of Strategies Palimpsests, Rhizomes, Nodes: Texts as Structural and Functional Urban Models Reversing Perspectives: Urban Memory in Built and Literary Postindustrial Cities Urban Activist Writing and the Transition from "Models of" to "Models for" Urban Developments Narrative Path Dependencies: From Scenario Building in Literary Texts to the Narratology and Rhetoric of Pragmatic Texts ‘Scripts’ in Urban Development: Procedural Knowledge, Self-Description and Persuasive Blueprint for the Future (Barbara Buchenau and Jens Martin Gurr) From the ‘Garden City’ to the ‘Smart City’: Literary Urban Studies, Policy Mobility Research and Travelling Urban Models Conclusion Bibliography Index

"In Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City, Jens Gurr offers a bracing new claim for what literature and literary studies can do. More practical and strategic than the familiar analysis of the "cultural work" that literature performs, his approach suggests that narrative, in literary texts but also in the texts created as part of urban planning and development, can provide models and scripts to help us think about what cities could be. In exploring this potential, Gurr advocates for the value of the humanities, not merely to reflect or uplift human experience but to shape it." --Sherry Lee Linkon, Georgetown University"Finally, there is a systematic overview of a field that has gained much importance in recent years. Charting Literary Urban Studies: Texts as Models of and for the City is a much-needed contribution to urban research – for students, instructors and practitioners alike." –Julia Sattler, TU Dortmund University