The New Metropolis: Urban Spaces, Urban Subjects, and Postmodernism

FAIN: FT-53254-05

Paula Elizabeth Geyh
Yeshiva University (New York, NY 10033-3201)

The proposed project, Legible Cities, is a chapter of a book-length study entitled The New Metropolis: The Urban Spaces and Urban Subjects of Postmodernity. The project explores the intersection of urban space, textuality, and subjectivity from its emergence in the modern city through its culmination in the postmodern city. It analyzes how the forces of economic, social, and political power (which speak through the texts and images that dominate urban spaces) shape the subjectivities of the city’s inhabitants by urging them to take up particular social roles, and how urbanites respond by assuming or resisting those roles. The project examines both actual urban sites and a wide range of literary and visual representations of the 20th-century city.

Associated Products

Cities, Citizens, and Technologies: Urban Life and Postmodernity (Book)
Title: Cities, Citizens, and Technologies: Urban Life and Postmodernity
Author: Paula Geyh
Abstract: This book is about the contemporary city and those who live in it. It is thus also about the urban world of the era (extending roughly from the 1960s to the present) that we see as postmodern, and specifically about how the postmodern city is changing under the impact of globalization and new information and communication technologies. In particular, Geyh explores how the urban spaces of postmodernity (parks, plazas, streets, sidewalks) and postmodern urban subjectivities and communities respond to and create each other – how they become mutually constructing. While there is much in this book about what makes a city "postmodern," its primary focus is on how the postmodern city is experienced by its inhabitants, and in this respect the book is also a study of everyday life in the postmodern era. As such, it deals not only with the ways in which the postmodern city has developed out of economic, technological, political, and cultural structures that are different from those of the modern city, but also with how the postmodern city changes our ways of knowing and experiencing the world and ourselves as postmodern urban subjects, as citizens of postmodernity.
Year: 2009
Publisher: Routledge
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 0415991722

"Cosmopolitan Exteriors and Cosmopolitan Interiors: The City and Hospitality in Haneke's Code Unknown" (Article)
Title: "Cosmopolitan Exteriors and Cosmopolitan Interiors: The City and Hospitality in Haneke's Code Unknown"
Author: Paula Geyh
Abstract: This book chapter conceptualizes postmodern global and urban imaginaries through different ideas of “cosmopolitanism,” from 1) the “free market” cosmopolitanism that underlies and drives the globalization that is the economic framework and foundation of the global city; to 2) the cultural cosmopolitanism that is in many ways bound up with market cosmopolitanism but also might offer ways to see beyond it; to 3) the ethical-political cosmopolitanisms that are, at least in part, responses to the forces of market cosmopolitanism. Using Jacques Derrida’s analysis of cosmopolitanism, the chapter examines Michael Haneke’s film Code Unknown, which portrays these three types of cosmopolitanism, their intertwining, and their reciprocity with our postmodern subjectivities as global citizens in global cities.
Year: 2010
Format: Other
Periodical Title: Europe Utopia: The Cinema of Michael Haneke
Publisher: Wallpaper Press

From Cities of Things to Cities of Signs: Urban Spaces and Urban Subjects" (Article)
Title: From Cities of Things to Cities of Signs: Urban Spaces and Urban Subjects"
Author: Paula Geyh
Abstract: The starting point in this article is the unprecedented convergence of signs and urban architecture in the twentieth century. Since the early 1920s, American and European cities have been awash in texts and images—advertising, street signs, newspaper headlines, political posters, and graffiti—which have become the dominant constituents of urban space, obscuring the streets and buildings that once composed the city. The emergence of this city of signs marks a transformation from the previous formation, the city of things, and this chapter aims to draw out the complexity of this transformation and the forces shaping it as seen in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie and John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer.
Year: 2006
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Twentieth-Century Literature 52:4 (Winter 2006):413-42.

"Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour" (Article)
Title: "Urban Free Flow: A Poetics of Parkour"
Author: Paula Geyh
Abstract: This article examines new practice and worldwide youth movement of parkour, its ethos and spatial logics through the Deleuzean concepts of smooth and striated spaces. Parkour, I argue, creates new ways of understanding and recreating the city as a space of freedom, creativity, and play.
Year: 2006
Primary URL: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0607/06-geyh.php
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: M/C Journal 9.3 (2006). 24 July 2006.

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