Modernity and Metropolis Writing, Film and Urban Formations [Hardcover]

A study of urban identity and community looks at selected twentieth century literary and film texts in the context of theorizations of modernism, postmodernism, postcoloniality and globalization. Brooker draws on Beck and Giddens to propose a 'reflexive modernism' which rewrites and re-imagines the urban scene. The principal cities considered are London and New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok. Writers considered include Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Hanif Kureishi, Iain Sinclair, Paul Auster, Sarah Schulman and William Gibson. Filmmakers include Patrick Keiller and Wong Kar-Wai.Introduction: Beginnings in Endings American Modernists in Modern London Modernism Deferred: Harlem Montage Inside Ethnicity: Suburban Outlooks Re-imagining London 'Hymn to the Great People's Republic of Brooklyn' Sarah Schulman and the Lower East Side In the Matrix: East West Encounters Postmetropolis and the Art of Fabrication Index

'In this ambitious book, Brooker not only re-examines the twentieth-century urban scene in the light of recent thinking in critical and cultural theory, but also takes the study of urban modernity in some exciting and surprising new directions. Modernity and Metropolis offers a far-reaching survey of urban space and representation that moves seamlessly from and between the modern and the postmodern in their many and diverse cultural formations. Metropolis and Modernity is...a must-read for anyone interesting in cities and the narratives that emerge from them...this book is lively, compelling, and makes an important and often original contribution to the study of urban modernity.' - Christoph Lindner, University of Aberystwith

'One of the many pleasures of this book is the way in which it both interrogates a modernism of the early twentieth century in new and invigorating ways, and stretches the concept of the modern across the history and geography of the twentieth century. Brooker's book is part of the current resurgenlC(