First Published in 1991. Knowing any real city, and still more so, knowing what it is to know a city, may be as much about passive as about active experience. What we read in the field-that field of the city in all its bizarre mixture of culture and nature-is bound to determine, to some non-fictional extent, what we know of it, what we imagine it could be, what we fear it may be, or become. These essays are meant to be, albeit in their critical mode, the recountings of knowing something through something else: they are the projected imagination, through reading, of the reading by the self and/or others (a wide range of each) of a city, or cities as such, of what city-knowing or city-thinking is. The city as stage, market, and labyrinth, variously trafficked and aestheticized, dreamt and politicized, as passionately written by authors from Cicero to Kazin, from Wordsworth, Dickens, Whitman, and Woolf, to Williams, Ashbery, and Bonnefoy, is the place the essays play themselves out, through architecture and metaphor.
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
