Main entry:

McNamara, Kevin R., 1958-

Title & Author:

Urban verbs : arts and discourses of American cities / Kevin R. McNamara.

Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1996.

Description:

vii, 310 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm

Notes:
Includes bibliographical references (pages 271-299) and index.
Building culture: the two New Yorks of Henry James's the American scene -- "Markets of delight": Sister Carrie and the romance of metropolitan life -- Recentering the city: Hugh Ferriss and urban form -- Expanding the city's limits: the opened form of William Carlos Williams's Paterson -- Containing the multitudes: policing desire in the naked city -- Popping the modernist bubble: Venturi, Scott Brown, and the cultivation of the complex cityscape.
Dust jacket.

Summary:

"This is a study of the representations of American cities, real and imagined, from the beginning of the twentieth century to the early 1970s. It combines examples of the travelogue, the novel, poetry, film and architectural fantasy with examples from real urban environments to demonstrate the centrality of the physical and social being of cities to American literature and other arts in the twentieth century. The author's reading of aesthetic texts alongside urban planning, economics, sociology, law, and historiography - discourses he treats as form-producing arts in their own right - shows as misleading the common dichotomy between models that focus on the structure of urban space and institutions, and those that describe cities as fluid constellations of social practices. It engages throughout with ongoing debates about the nature of modern urbanism and its consequences."--Publisher's description.

Resources:
Table of contents
Book review (H-Net)
Book review (H-Net)
Contributor biographical information
Publisher description

ISBN:

0804726450 (cloth ; acidfree paper)
9780804726450 (cloth ; acidfree paper)

Subject:

Cities and towns in art.
Arts, American 20th century.
Arts, American.
Villes dans l'art.
Arts américains.
Arts américains 20e siècle.
art américain (Etats-Unis) littérature américaine (Etats-Unis) urbanisme 19e s. 20e s.

Holdings:

Location: Library main 134886
Call No.: ID NX650.C66.M36; ID:97-B583
Status: Available