Reading the Modern American City: the Urban Space in Fiction ? from Dreiser to Bellow to Amy Tan

The City has always exerted a pulsating fascination on the human mind. Aristotle sought to define it in terms of its organization, through the basic analogy with the individual and his body. Freud saw it as a metaphor of the individual's psyche, comparing the archeological layers of the city to the layered structure of the mind. Similarly, artists and writers have found in the city a prolific source of inspiration, time and again recreating and rendering it through their narrative and aesthetic discourses. And more than any other European city, the American city felt and reflected the driving forces of modernization that started in the late 19th century and greatly impacted the architecture and structure of the old city all over the world, turning it not only into a powerful seat of the money economy, but also into knot of multiple existences, experiences and discourses. Rendered narratively, the modern city then became similar to a palimpsest, a text of many texts and voices, disparate and interconnected at the same time. The present work attempts, therefore, to read this intertextual concoction that is the modern American city.