Resolving the city

• Main Author: Gibbons, Daniel John
• Language: English
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: Urban geography; Cities and towns in literature
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2429/9297

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.