Urban Formalism
The Work of City Reading
This book can be opened with
Urban Formalism radically reimagines what it meant to “read” a brave new urban world during the transformative middle decades of the nineteenth century. At a time when contemporaries in the twin capitals of modernity in the West, New York and Paris, were learning to make sense of unfamiliar surroundings, city peoples increasingly looked to the experiential patterns, or forms, from their everyday lives in an attempt to translate urban experience into something they could more easily comprehend. Urban Formalism interrogates both the risks and rewards of an interpretive practice that depended on the mutual relation between urbanism and formalism, at a moment when the subjective experience of the city had reached unprecedented levels of complexity.
This book not only provides an original cultural history of forms. It posits a new form of urban history, comprising the representative rituals of interpretation that have helped give meaningful shape to metropolitan life.
Don’t be misled by the subtitle. This is a big and ambitious book that proposes to collapse the conventional distinction between urban experience and urban interpretation/representation. While rereading familiar texts and images from nineteenth-century New York and Paris, Faflik illuminates patterns of shared perception, structures of collective consciousness, and ordering frames that both comprise and distort modern city life. In the process, he offers students of literature and cultural history a provocatively and deceptively simple category – form – for describing what it is they study.—David Henkin, author of City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York
With this book, Faflik makes a serious and novel contribution to urban theory.—Choice
Introduction | 1
1 Strong Reading, or the Literary Conversion of the Urban | 17
2 Reading the Urban Form of Fire | 46
3 The Revolutionary Formalism of France | 72
4 Photography and the Image of the City | 96
Afterword | 124
Acknowledgments | 127
Notes | 131
Bibliography | 149
Index | 179
