| New York City Built by Words explores the lesser-examined role of the built environment in representing urban spaces in modern New York City novels. This project reevaluates the often overlooked importance of the centrality of urban architecture in the genre by revisiting the "rag-to-riches" stories from the city's period of growth and by focusing on their use of skyscrapers as literary settings. This peculiar centrality is represented as a synthesis of the physical and non-material environment, and its development is traced from the turn of the century to the end of the World War II.;The first chapter looks at Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie (1900), a seminal text that establishes New York City as a new American metropolis in comparison to Chicago. It argues that Dreiser depicts New York's urban space as an urbanscape that exists between the ideal and materialistic environment, using tropes such as newspaper, theatre, and restaurants.;The second chapter examines F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and Damned (1922), "May Day" (1922), The Great Gatsby (1925), and "My Lost City" (1931). It shows how Fitzgerald establishes a peculiar urban space, dynamic and surreal, thereby creating the image of a romantic city as a combination of physical and ideal environments throughout his New York novels.;The third chapter pairs The Fleischer Brothers' animated feature Mr. Bug Goes to Town (1941) with Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead (1943). While the former portrays individuals as dwarfed by the powerful physical and social forces of architecture associated closely with the capitalist culture, the latter depicts an architect's struggle to win over the changing urban space and finally implanting a static, permanent building, thereby defying the traditional representation of New York architecture that showed motion and change as its main features.;The final chapter follows the contemporary development of the genre after the 9/11 terrorist attack, namely, by Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) and Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin (2008). It discusses how the traumatic experience affected views about urban architecture, and attempts to recover from the trauma took place in relation to the representation of skyscrapers. |
