Urban

BRITISH CULTURAL STUDIES (BCS) – Lecture

Freshmen

Course Tutor: Anemona Alb,

University of Oradea

Unit 4. Urban Studies, Urban Britain.

KEYWORDS: urban-space-as-cultural-locus; the (visual) aggressiveness of cities;

the megalopolis; the pressures of consumerism; the mall as metonym for the city;
the rhetoric of the ‘body’: human trajectories and urban space; the grammar of the
visual – the grammar of urban space; ‘Angst’: the city as psychological space; the
cultural manipulation of space: centrality and marginality from an urban
perspective.

Motto: “The City is a huge monastery.” (Erasmus)

“Hell is a place much like London.” (P.B. Shelley)

4.1 Text Analysis 1.

Postmodernism raises questions about the appetite for architecture which it then
virtually at once re-directs. (…); …and as for built space, there too a protective
narcosis has long reigned, a ‘don’t-want-to-see-it’, ‘don’t-want –to-know-about-it’
attitude that may, on the whole, have been the most sensible relationship to
develop with the older city. (Postmodernism would then be the date on which all
that changed.) The immediate post-war heritage of this virtually natural or
biological species protection has been the diversion of such aesthetic instincts (a
very doubtful thing to call them) into instant commodification – fast foods, on the
one hand, and, on the other hand, the kitsch interior decoration and furniture for
which the United States is famous and which has been explained as a kind of
security blanket – chintz of the first postwar domestic production – designed to ward
off memories of the Depression and its stark physical deprivations. (…) As though it
had studied under hegel, therefore, the postmodern lifts up, and cancels, all that
junk (Aufhebung), including the hamburger within the diremption of its gourmet
meals and Las vegas within the rainbow-flavour landscape of its psychedelic
corporate monuments.

The appetite for architecture (…) means the city, certainly, and it means the free-
standing building, preferably blocks of stone, whose shape in space does you some
good to see, if that’s the right verb. What is in question here is the monumental ; it
does not need contemporary rhetorics of the body and its trajectories, nor is it
basely visual in any of the colour-coded postmodern senses. You don’t have to walk
up the grand staircase personally, but it is not some mannerist parabola, either,
that you can miniaturize with a quick look and carry home in your pocket. (…)

Postmodernism, I think, went on to abolish something even more fundamental,

namely, the distinction between the inside and the outside (all the modernists ever
said about that was that the one ought to express the other, which suggests that no
one had yet begun to doubt whether you needed to have either of them at all in the
first place). The former streets then become so many aisles in a department store,
which, if you think about it in Japanese fashion, becomes the model and the
emblem, the secret inner structure and the concept, of the postmodern ‘city’,
already, appropriately enough, realized in certain sections of Tokyo.

(Frederic Jameson: Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of

Late Capitalism)

4.2 Text Analysis 2.

In Praise of Cities

Casual yet urgent in her lovemaking,

She constantly asserts her independence:

Suddenly turning moist pale walls upon you

- Your own designs, peeling and unachieved –

Or her whole darkness hunching in an alley.

And all at once you enter the embrace

Withheld by day while you solicited.

She wanders lewdly, whispering her given name,

Charing Cross Road, or Forty-Second Street:

The longest streets, desire that never ends,

Familiar and inexplicable, wearing

Cosmetic light a fool could penetrate.

She presses you with her hard ornaments,

Arcades, late movie shows, the piled lit windows

Of surplus stores. Here she is loveliest:

Extreme, material, and the work of man.

(Thom Gunn)