Creative Imaginary: The Spatial Politics Of New York City In E. L. Doctorow's The Waterworks, World's Fair And Lives Of The Poets

New York City as an urban center is important not only for its metropolitan scale but also for its relationship to America's promises. Regarded as one of the most thoughtful and evocative contemporary American writers, E. L. Doctorow is a keen observer and thinker of the social realities of New York. He puts the"historical and political New York"on trial, and proposes an"imaginary"New York as an essential analytical category of re-reading American history to adjust the public lens upon the past as well as the present, and to create a powerful discourse upon the construction of history. In this paper, I would like to study the spatial politics of New York in his two major novels and a novella about New York—World's Fair (1985), Lives of the Poets (1984) and The Waterworks (1994). The project is intended to discuss how the writer's"imaginary"City is problematized and allegorized in light of Henri Lefebvre's theoretical framework about the production of space. Exposing the actual production of New York as a social and urban space, these three books comprise a hologram of the geographical as well as the historical New York.