"New York,
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of, There’s nothing you can’t do,
Now you’re in New York,
these streets will make you feel brand new,
the lights will inspire you,
lets hear it for New York, New York, New York"
These lines from the song Empire State of Mind (2009) by the famous American rapper, record producer and entrepreneur Jay-Z, who was born in Brooklyn, New York, reveal the challenge of capturing the City of New York in words or text. New York City is on the one hand celebrated as the place "where dreams are made of", whose "streets will make you feel brand new" and whose "lights will inspire you", but on the other hand also as a "[c]oncrete jungle".
The contrasting, yet at the same time very tempting ideas of the ’City that Never Sleeps’ make it not only the most popular city in the United States, but also the most "dynamic, varied and perplexing in the world" (Gates ix). Robert A. Gates further describes the challenge for the writer, singer or song- writer: "There are no standards [one] can grasp; no guidelines [one] can follow", because [t]he City presents no standard language, philosophy, or neighborhood that can be labelled as typically New York" (ix).
In order to understand the city and its influences at least to some extent, it might be useful to talk about the name ’New York’ and the events in history that helped to make it the most important and most famous city in the world.
When people talk about New York, the City of New York is referred to and more precisely the most densely populated borough of Manhattan. In 1898, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens and Staten Island were consolidated to the City of New York, which is part of the state of New York. Therefore, New York and New York City are almost always used synonymously and refer to the same part of the city: Manhattan.
It can be subdivided into Lower, Midtown, and Uptown regions. Westbound the Hudson River divides the city from New Jersey and East Manhattan is separated from Long Island by the East River. Other frequently used nicknames are ’The Big Apple’, ’Gotham’, ’Center of the Universe’, ’The City that Never Sleeps’ and ’The Capital of the World’.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 The American City as Metaphor
3 Pictures of New York City
3.1 Panorama of the City
3.1.1 John Dos Passos’Manhattan Transfer
3.2 Into the City
3.2.1 The Polarized City of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
3.3 The Metaphysical City
3.3.1 Paul Auster’s City of Glass
4 Conclusion
Research Objectives and Themes
This thesis examines how New York City is represented and interpreted as a metaphor in selected American literary works, analyzing the city's role in shaping protagonists' lives and societal perceptions across different historical and stylistic contexts.
- Evolution of New York City as a literary metaphor
- Naturalistic perspectives on urban environmental determinism
- Postmodern interpretations of urban space and language
- The city as a site of social polarization and isolation
- Literary techniques for capturing the dynamic nature of a metropolis
Excerpt from the Book
The Polarized City of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets
In their novels both authors focus on the part of the City they know best - Stephen Crane on the poor working-class people living in the Bowery district and Edith Wharton on the rich, who reside in mansions on the Upper East Side. This polarized City came into existence due to the mechanisms of industrialization, urbanization and a growing sense for materialism. Therefore, the gap between rich and poor widened and was responsible for the development of the East Side slums as "a district that in Crane’s day was becoming synonymous with poverty and the attendant vices of filth, drink, crime, and degradation" (Crane xvii). What is quite interesting is the fact that despite the opposite focus of each of the novels, they conclude surprisingly similar.
New York as a socially polarized city is an unhealthy city for, as in Edith Wharton’s novel, the inhabitants live out their lives in insulated, greedy splendor, or as in Stephen Crane, they end up as drunkards and prostitutes (Gates 30).
The question that needs to be analyzed here is: What makes the City unhealthy? In a letter to Hamlin Garland, Crane pointed out that "environment is a tremendous thing in the world and frequently shapes lives regardless" (Sorrentino 82). Taking a closer look at the word ’environment’ itself one can observe that the term is ambiguous. On the surface the term only seems to describe the external living conditions of the people, but both Edith Wharton and Stephen Crane also referred to the mental influences, such as certain expectations or institutions like the Church and the theater, that constantly affect society. Thus, the lives of Lily Bart and Maggie Johnson are unhealthy, because their living conditions and mental influences determine their path of life.
Summary of Chapters
1 Introduction: Provides a contextual overview of New York City in literature and defines the scope and methodology of the thesis.
2 The American City as Metaphor: Explores the historical and linguistic evolution of the city as a metaphor within the American literary tradition.
3 Pictures of New York City: A deep dive into the literary representations of New York, split into three specific thematic investigations of selected novels.
3.1 Panorama of the City: Analyzes how John Dos Passos uses impressionistic techniques to depict New York as a mechanised and rapidly changing metropolis.
3.2 Into the City: Compares the works of Stephen Crane and Edith Wharton to illustrate the impact of social polarization and environmental determinism on individuals.
3.3 The Metaphysical City: Discusses Paul Auster's postmodern, metaphysical portrayal of New York as a complex, unreadable, and labyrinthine space.
4 Conclusion: Synthesizes the findings, concluding that while different authors use various metaphors, New York is consistently depicted as a space that disillusions its inhabitants through rapid, uncontrolled change.
Keywords
New York City, American literature, metaphor, urban studies, John Dos Passos, Stephen Crane, Edith Wharton, Paul Auster, naturalism, postmodernism, environment, social polarization, identity, alienation, metropolis
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the primary focus of this thesis?
This thesis explores how New York City functions as a metaphorical construct in selected American novels, analyzing how the city is perceived and interpreted by different authors.
What are the core thematic areas discussed?
The core themes include the impact of urbanization on social structure, environmental determinism, the loss of individual identity in a metropolis, and the shifting linguistic representation of urban space.
What is the central research question?
The research investigates how New York City is depicted and interpreted as a metaphor and how the topography and atmosphere of the city influence the development and fates of the protagonists in the selected texts.
Which scientific methods are applied?
The study utilizes a literary analysis approach, drawing on historical and cultural contexts as well as literary theory, to evaluate how specific authors frame the city's role in their narratives.
What does the main body of the work cover?
The main body consists of specific case studies: John Dos Passos's panoramic view in 'Manhattan Transfer', the social polarization in works by Edith Wharton and Stephen Crane, and Paul Auster's metaphysical interpretation in 'City of Glass'.
Which keywords characterize this work?
Key terms include New York City, literary metaphor, urban alienation, social polarization, modernism, postmodernism, and environmental determinism.
How does Paul Auster's 'City of Glass' differ from the other analyzed works?
Unlike the naturalistic focus of Crane or Wharton, Auster’s work approaches the city through a postmodern, metaphysical lens, where the city is viewed as an unreadable text and identity is fractured by the complexity of urban life.
Why is the concept of 'environment' crucial to the analysis of Stephen Crane's and Edith Wharton's work?
For these authors, the environment acts as a deterministic force that shapes the fates of characters, whether through physical slum conditions or the restrictive social pressures of the upper class, eventually leading to their downfall.
- Arbeit zitieren
- Kim Vahnenbruck (Autor:in), 2012, New York City as Metaphor in Selected American Texts, München, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/195304
