Prologue: Urban Hermeneutics and the Problem of the Fetish Space

Reading about New York City is undoubtedly a labor of intellectual seduction and fascination. Given the growing number of studies on the topic, writing about New York, on the other hand, is bound to be a labor of intellectual reformation: the geographical, cultural, historical reconstruction of knowledge, of the meaning of socio-spatial relations and their representation, whereby the city becomes a currency of interdisciplinary exchange. It is this spirit of interdisciplinary inquiry that governs my project on the politics of urban space in late-twentieth century New York writing, a project comfortably wedged between two significant urban moments in the history of the city: the fiscal crisis of the mid-1970s and the market crash of October 1987. Reformed Geographies , however, is not just about today’s fashionable spirit of interdisciplinary work; it is primarily about a change of critical paradigm, a mode of making different, more complex sense of New York literary and nonliterary “quotations” combined. The book thus produces a critical space that relates meaningfully to multiple spaces of knowledge and representation: urban geography, sociology, history, politics, and not least, the structures of urban experience conserved in archives, in literary or cultural representations. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.