City Codes

City Codes is a study of the representation of the city in the modern novel that takes difference as its point of departure, so that cities are read according to the cultural and social position of the urbanite. These urban narratives are analysed in the context of a cultural repertoire of city codes, from the architectural features of window and street to the social and historical signs of the landmark and the passerby, with the emphasis on the subject’s construction of his or her place as shaped by history, politics, nationality, gender, class, and race. The study moves from boundaries inscribed onto the cityscape to distances experienced by the city dwellers; its ‘real’ and textual cities are Warsaw, Jerusalem, New York, Chicago, Paris, London, and Dublin. The novels discussed are by Isaac Bashevis Singer, Amos Oz, Theodore Dreiser, Ralph Ellison, Henry James, Henry Roth, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.