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Cargando... Fragments of the European Citypor Stephen Barber
Ninguno Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro.   s.manghani | Jan 31, 2011 |  sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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This book explores the visual transformation of the contemporary European city, focusing on the most emblematic and visibly wounded of all European cities - Berlin. Taking as its subject the "intricately assembled, relentlessly disassembling metropolitan screen", it charts the virulent implosions of culture, the distortions and violence that give city-living its fractured and hallucinatory quality. Provocatively written as a series of inter-locking poetic fragments, the text evokes the formation of metropolitan "identity" as it ricochets between the physical surface of the city and the vulnerable but manipulating consciousness of city dwellers. Barber has discovered a powerful new vocabulary - a vocabulary charged with the visual and sonic impact of the cinema. Like the city, the text pulsates, creatively chaotic, raw and exhilarating. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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 Google Books — Cargando...GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)307.76094Social sciences Social Sciences; Sociology and anthropology Communities Specific kinds of communities Urban communities Biography And History EuropeClasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio: (4)
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A particularly dark metaphor within the book is established with an entry on the phenomenon of the traffic-jam. The European city, Barber writes, is ‘a deadlocked apparatus for living’ (p. 55), with the only escape ‘mental side stepping . . . [for] like the suicide who cannot imagine the next day, the inhabitant of the city cannot imagine the next complete revolution of the car’s wheels’ (p. 55). The call to awaken oneself is explicit, but what does it mean here to awaken? A dilemma persists, since ‘to rearrange Europe would simply shake the pieces into an equally heterogeneous order’ (p. 23). Here we need to consider ‘the survival of those who inhabit the city’ to be in itself part of the answer, for in the face of another ‘on subway trains or across the counters of the supermarkets . . . [is] read the world of the city in negative, exposed and printed’ (p. 69). In other words, the marks of the city are found on its faces where the present moment is reasserted. The absolute heterogeneity of these faces projects ‘the ongoing contradiction of its matter with the incoming upheaval of the city’ (p. 70). There is, as Cavell writes, ‘reason to want it affirmed that the world is coherent without me. [. . .] It will mean that the present judgement upon me is not yet the last’ (1971: 160). Barber never lets up on the ricochet of meanings generating in and of the city. And just as the city ‘must be swallowed whole’ (p. 20), his reader must chart their way through dense and convoluted prose. The scattering of fragments more than the shuttle of a snow-shaker, for concur- rent with this process is a place to think about our (different) settlements. And despite much that can be contested in Barber’s account, his is a ‘writing aloud’;4 out of which, like a dazed city arrivée, you reach an interstice ripe for reply.
FULL REVIEW:
'Experimental Text-image Travel Literature' in Theory, Culture & Society, 2003, Vol.20, no.3, pp.127-138.
http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/20/3/127?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&a...