| When critics and reviewers praise contemporary urban films and television productions, they often do so by comparing these texts to 19th-century realist and naturalist urban novels. David Simon's HBO series The Wire, for example, has been lauded for its similarities to Dickens's multilayered and realist vision of London. Unfortunately, these commentaries usually fail to acknowledge developments in contemporary U.S. urban fiction, perhaps in no small degree because much of this fiction explores the experiences of people from a variety of ethnic backgrounds. Ethics and Urban Realities challenges general assumptions about the state of U.S. urban fiction implied in commentaries on The Wire and made more overt in essays such as Tom Wolfe's "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel" in which Wolfe blames poststructuralism for the supposed death of the urban novel. These faulty assumptions suggest why, despite the renewed "ethical turn" in literary studies, literary criticism has not engaged satisfactorily with the ethical frameworks of recent U.S. urban fiction.;I argue that contemporary U.S. urban fiction is deeply invested in the ethics of urban life and that attentive readings of the fiction can promote strategies for developing more sustainable, peaceful, and healthier cities. Novels by Thomas Pynchon, Walter Mosley, David Treuer, John Edgar Wideman, Karen Tei Yamashita, Ernesto Quinonez, Don DeLillo, William Gibson, and Octavia Butler, among others, disrupt thinking about U.S. cities in terms of "crisis" and "renaissance." These two buzzwords pervade journalistic debates, historical writings, and popular representations of U.S. cities. Crisis discourse tends to frighten people about urban life, while the discourse of urban renaissance tends to make them complacent. Urban fiction puts needed pressure on these terms by showing how genuine crisis conditions affect lived experiences and how renaissance is conceptually and ethically limiting. My project, however, is not merely deconstructive and disruptive. It also assesses the ethical values that permeate U.S. urban fiction since 1984. These most prominently include commitments to inter-class and inter-racial contact, to what I term preemptive care, and to genuine creation in opposition to mindless consumption. |
