Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities

Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities: Art, Literature and Urban Spaces explores phenomena of urban mapping in the discourses and strategies of a variety of postwar artists and practitioners of space: Allan Kaprow, Claes Oldenburg, Vito Acconci, Gordon Matta-Clark, Robert Smithson, Rebecca Solnit, Matthew Buckingham, contemporary Situationist projects. The distinctive approach of the book highlights the interplay between texts and site-oriented practices, which have often been treated separately in critical discussions. Monica Manolescu considers spatial investigations that engage with the historical and social conditions of the urban environment and reflect on its mediated nature. Cartographic procedures that involve walking and surveying are interpreted as unsettling and subversive possibilities of representing and navigating the postwar American city. The book posits mapping as a critical nexus that opens up new ways of studying some of the most important postwar artistic engagements with New York and other American cities.

• urban studies
• spatial literary studies
• geocriticism
• mapping place
• cartography and place
• postwar American literature
• postwar American art
• postwar American architecture
• suburban spaces

“Cartographies of New York and Other Postwar American Cities offers an original focus on intermediality, elucidating the way that language and text remain in play – become indispensible components in fact – in avant-garde representations of the city. Manolescu effectively shows how the work of the artists she identifies cannot be adequately understood without grappling with their tropes of metaphor and linguistic indeterminacy, textual fragmentation and semiotic slippage. Overall, this is an enlightening, original and erudite book that represents a significant and welcome contribution to spatial literary studies.” (Will Norman, author of Transatlantic Aliens: Modernism, Exile and Culture in Midcentury America (2016))

• University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France

  Monica Manolescu

Monica Manolescu is Associate Professor of English at the University of Strasbourg, France. She has published a study of Vladimir Nabokov’s geographies and co-authored a companion to Lolita. She has also written articles on 20^th-century and contemporary American literature and art.

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