Download PDF by Edward J. Ahearn: Urban Confrontations in Literature and Social Science,

By Edward J. Ahearn

In an leading edge contribution to the demanding of disciplinary obstacles, Edward J. Ahearn juxtaposes works of literature with the writings of social scientists to find how jointly they light up urban lifestyles in ways in which neither can accomplish individually. Ahearn's argument spans from the second one 1/2 the 19th century in Western Europe to the present-day usa and contains a wide variety of literary genres and sociological faculties. for instance, Charles Baudelaire's essays at the urban are considered along the paintings of Emile Durkheim and Georg Simmel; Bertolt Brecht's "Jungle of Cities" heightens the arguments of Louis Wirth and Robert Park; Richard Wright's "Native Son" and Saul Bellow's "The Adventures of Augie March" are re-visioned in tandem with works by means of William Julius Wilson and others; Herman Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" poses a problem to James Q. Wilson's "Bureaucracy"; Toni Morrison's ancient novel "Jazz" is buttressed through the occupation of Robert Moses and the revisionist paintings of historians Hilary Ballon and Kenneth T. Jackson; and Don DeLillos' "Cosmopolis" comes into excellent concentration within the mild of arguments on global cybercities via David Harvey, Saskia Sassen, and Manuel Cassels. Resisting the temptation to disregard contradictions for the sake of interpretation, Ahearn as a substitute bargains the reader a view of the fashionable urban as complicated as his topic matter.

Here the methodologies and data generated by way of the social sciences are either complemented and subverted through the adventure of urban lifestyles as portrayed in literature. With its different narrative strategies and moving issues of view, that are as disorienting to the reader as a international urban is to an arriving immigrant, literature reinforces the significance of technique and outlook within the social sciences. finally, Ahearn indicates, neither literature nor the social sciences can seize the event of city distress.

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It is one of a number of poems that involve hypocritical and guilty encounters with the poor, texts in which the interplay of vision and speech, eyes and words, fascinates, and implicates, both narrators and readers. ” And the speaker adds that there are so few amusements which are not guilty! ” Here indeed is a model for generosity on the cheap. But suddenly the movement of “The Pauper’s Toy” changes, evoking a magnificent country property and, behind its fence, a beautiful rich child. ” Although living in two separate worlds, the two share the vision of the poor child’s toy, a live rat.

But how, in what continues to be seen by some as a “classic” and “pivotal” essay on the city, the German Jewish immigrant who had become an expert on minority populations in Chicago could, in 1938, so minimize racial conflict remains a mystery. Another kind of German-American Chicago production, Brecht’s Jungle of Cities, will provide a stunning corrective. After all of this, Wirth concludes that whereas the sociologist cannot by himself solve the problems he discusses, “he may, if he discovers his proper [theoretical, not ad hoc] function, have an important contribution to make to their comprehension and solution” (Wirth, 1969, 164; my emphasis).

This is hardly the sublime capital celebrated in Baudelaire’s essays—rather the city as experienced by the poor, in which alienation from all that is satisfying and beautiful provokes a misdirected violence. The speaker rudely pushes the man toward the staircase, then commits an act that is immensely more destructive: I went to the balcony and I grabbed a little pot of flowers, and when the man reappeared at the door entrance, I let my engine of war drop down perpendicularly on the back edge of his pack.

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