City Images

Mary Ann Caws Graduate School City University of New York

• INTRODUCTION The City on Our Mind 1. DISCOURSE AND THE CITY The City: Some Classical Moments; Discourse, Polis, Finiteness, Perfection 2. COGNITIVE MAPPING: LABYRINTHS, LIBRARIES AND CROSSROADS The Labyrinth as Sign of City, Text, and Thought; The Labyrinth and the Library en abyme: Eco, Borges, Dickens; On City Streets and Narrative Logic 3. CHARACTER AND POETRY IN THE CITY From Topos to Anthropoid: The City as Character in Twentieth-Century Texts; The Cosmopolis of Poetics: Urban World, Uncertain Poetry; 4. THE CITY AS LANDSCAPE Virginia Woolf's London and the Feminist Revision of Modernism; Cingria and His Cities; The New York Writer and His Landscapes 5. NEW YORK TO PARIS The Breakup of the City and the Breakdown of Narrative: Baudelaire's Le Cygne and James Merrill's Urban Convalescence; From Memory Lane to Memory Boulevard: Paris Change! Paris, Baudelaire and Benjamin: The Poetics of Urban Violence; Framing the City: Two Parisian Windows 6. CLAIMS ON THE CITY City, Swain and Subtext in Blake's Songs; Things Can't Go on Like This: A Beggar's Itinerary 7. CONTEMPORARY CITIES: TRAFFICKING AND FILMING Trafficking in Philosophy: Lines of Force in the City-Text; City/Cinema/Dream 8. ENACTMENT AND LASTNESS; The Last Manifesto