Scale, Form, and Urban Crisis: Literature and the City

This seminar seeks to build on and contribute to the growing body of theory and criticism situated at the intersection of literary studies and urban studies. Following the lead of literary critics like Caroline Levine, Lieven Ameel, and Jeremy Tambling, we emphasize the mutually enriching interplay between literary forms and real-world social and material forms (c.f. e.g. Levine 2015). And following spatial theorists and urbanists like Henri Lefebvre, Peter Hall, and Edward Glaeser, we see the scale of the city as a particularly salient level of analysis for the observation, critique, and eventual transformation of social forms.  This seminar seeks to explore how literature makes legible the connections between different scales of human experience in its representations of cities and urban social formations. Cities occupy a strategic level at which large-scale social and historical structures interact with the more localized experience of individuals in particularly telling ways, and literature makes possible strategic insights that remain invisible to other modes of discourse. Whereas large-scale social forces and deep structures can sometimes feel overwhelming or inchoate, narrative depictions at the scale of the city help to make their implications stand out with particular vividness.
 

One of the key ways in which literature does this is through the representation of crisis. Both historically and in the current moment, the city is frequently the site at which ecological crisis, war, forced migration, etc. are most intensely registered. Building on work carried out for a forthcoming edited collection, Urban Discourses of Crisis, Resilience, and Resistance: Cities Under Stress, this panel will explore how literature registers the connections between these global processes and local urban experience, and the new possibilities for agency and intervention in those processes that literature might enable.
 

As the above suggests, this panel seeks to promote the interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of literary and urbanistic methodologies and ways of knowing. We are thus especially interested in papers that focus on literary representations of urban life in light of their ability to contribute to the resolution of the real-world challenges facing cities. Papers on any literary period, genre, or tradition are welcome.

Some issues that papers on this panel might address include:

How have literary works represented the most salient crises facing cities, whether historically or in the contemporary moment?
How can the various kinds of relationships between literary form and urban form be theorized? 
How can critics highlight the literary representation of urban crises in ways that enable us to understand or address such crises in new ways?
How does focusing on questions of scale help us to understand the work that literature and urban experience do?