| Summary: | This thesis examines the deeply layered genre of crime and detective fiction
together with academic texts dealing, broadly, with urban geography. These
apparently separated writings are read together and against one another in order
to reveal answers to important questions of how the city is organized and
arranged in its texts. In particular, this thesis analyzes certain structures in place in
forms of textual representation, structures which have deep implications for the
writing of the city. Edgar Allan Poe's Dupin stories appear alongside Michael
Dibdin's Aurelio Zen novels, and Christopher Prendergast's study of Paris in the
nineteenth century. Walter Mosley's series of Los Angeles mysteries are discussed
in the context of particularly prominent academic representations of L.A.
Reading such a diverse collection of texts together and against one another
is a deliberate tactic, intended to draw out the similar structures in place in very
different forms of writing. Those structures are the critical issue here, specifically
with regard to the need for examinations of the city that consider not merely which
components of the city appear in texts about the city, but also how the city
appears in text. How the city appears in text has a good deal to do with the
demands exercised by the medium of representation, and a key concern here is to
draw out the need for doing away with an often unquestioned separation between
places—cities—and their texts. Instead what is studied and ultimately proposed
here is a focus on the intersection between subject and textual structure, and how
that intersection actively produces the city.
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