Out now with Ohio State University Press: the edited volume City Scripts: Narratives of Postindustrial Urban Futures (Buchenau, Gurr & Sulimma). The book is available open access! (pdf here)

From the abstract:

“Storytelling shapes how we view our cities, legitimizing histories, future plans, and understandings of the urban. City Scripts responds to calls by literary theorists to engage a new kind of narrative analysis that recalibrates close reading and interpretation to the multiple ways in which narratives “do things”—how they intervene in the world and take action in everyday life. A multidisciplinary cast of contributors approaches this new way of looking at cities through the stories people tell about them, looking especially at political activism and urban planning, which depend on the invention of plausible stories of connectedness and of a redemptive future.”

https://ohiostatepress.org/books/titles/9780814215524.html

The book comes out of the interdisciplinary work of the City Scripts group formed at the American Studies Departments of the University Alliance Ruhr (Duisburg-Essen, Bochum, Dortmund), with whom I had the privilege to collaborate over the past years. Really happy to see this work culminate in this brilliant collection!

The book includes my own article “Redemptive Scripts in the City Novel“. Drawing on a corpus of New York novels, the article argues that endeavors towards personal, communal, and national redemption have provided a powerful script in more than a century of writing literary New York. Literary works discussed include Edith Wharton’s short story “Autres temps…” (1911), F. Scot Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925) and Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist (1999). The article connects the notion of redemption to broader discussions on narrative closure, as well as to modes of storytelling in contemporary urban planning.

From the conclusion:

“Redemptive plots, then, continue to be important narrative frames of meaning in American lives and American cultural representations. Such plots are hinged upon the desire to see balance restored, sins atoned for, freedom gained. Redemptive plots are also about finding a voice to salvage something meaningful from the broken world order. Some authors will hope that this redeeming aspect will be replicated in their readers or audiences. Other texts will engage with redemptive plots in ways that draw the readers’ attention to the dangers of believing that order can be restored painlessly—The Great Gatsby and, more recently, the planning document Vision 2020 gesture toward the possibility of redemption while warning the reader not to be blinded by the promise of new beginnings or easy solutions. In the American context, redemptive scripts are also the arena for processes of exclusion and differentiation, and in a work such as Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist, the promise of redemption is considered in light of its universalist pretenses and complicated by connecting it to America’s history of racialized inequality. Moving into the present century, new challenges—such as catastrophic man-made climate change—will undoubtedly further complicate how redemptive scripts are drawn upon to deal with past traumas and future threats.” (169)

The article is part of a broader research project that looks at notions of redemption in literature and culture, with a recent keynote lecture on the same subject presented at the Making the City conference in Chemnitz, Germany.

At Alcalá University, Spain, for the Underground Imaginaries conference. I’ll be presenting about “Symbolic Cities beneath Brussels”, with an examination of Brüsel and other underground cities in two graphic novels by François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters.

The conference is organized by Fringe Urban Narratives and EROSS@DCU, with a host of collaborating networks and institutes, including the Association for Literary Urban Studies and the European Society of Comparative Literature. Very much looking forward to meet with friends and colleagues, old and new. Thanks especially to Patricia Garcia for bringing this all together and for inviting me to be involved in the Fringe network and this conference.

My presentation is part of the ALUS session “Underworld Cities”, with Riikka P. Pulkkinen on Athens’ underworld in literature, and Hanne Juntunen on urban and human underworlds. I’m especially keen on some of the upcoming sessions on thresholds, sewers and mines, underground anxieties and utopias, among others.

I’ve also had the opportunity of a quick visit to Madrid, going to the Atocha Station and the Prado to see Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the Cross – following in the footsteps of the protagonist in Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station (2011).

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Abstract of my presentation below:

”Symbolic Cities Beneath Brussels”: Brüsel and other underground cities in graphic novels by François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters

This paper examines underground cities located underneath the Belgian and European capital, Brussels. It focuses on two Belgo-French graphic novels by François Schuiten & Benoît Peeters:  Brüsel (1992) and Le Dernier Pharaon (2019). I will draw on existing research on literary urban studies in the context of graphic novels, including work by Jan Baetens, Giada Peterle and Benjamin Fraser. This paper aims to provide a tentative classification of the functions of underground cities by adapting James Phelan’s character classification of synthetic, mimetic, and thematic functions to the functioning of literary spaces.

Image source: Schuiten, Gunzig, Van Dormael & Durieux: Le Dernier Pharaon (2019).

Looking forward to participate today and tomorrow (14-15 October) in the symposium “Urban (Im)mobilities and Borderland Narratives“, a collaboration between the Fringe network and the Association for Literary Urban Studies. The symposium is hosted by the University of Alcala, Spain. Unfortunately, we will not be able to meet in person – hope I will the opportunity to visit Alcala in person in the not-too-distant future!

Thriled by the promising array of keynote speakers, and especially looking forward to the talks of Anna-Leena Toivanen on “Mobilities and the City in Francophone
African Literatures” and Tania Rossetto on “From the Cartographic Fringes: Map
Mobilizations and the Urban”.

My own presentation, ”Colson Whitehead’s The Intuitionist: Contesting Elevation in the Modern City”, will approach the allegory of the elevator in The Intuitionist as figure that contests urban modernity’s promises of universal upward mobility.

Conference abstract:

“Our symposium builds on recent contributions of literary scholarship on mobility (Marian Aguiar, Charlotte Mathieson and Lynne Pearce) and is rooted in the “new mobilities” framework developed by the sociologists and geographers (Miloš N. Mladenović, Catherine N. Nash, Andrew Gorman-Murray, Mimi Sheller and John Urry). This framework is sensitive to the intersecting dimensions of power and discrimination that shape urban kinetic features. We invite scholars across disciplines and geographical contexts with an interest in examining how (im)mobility in the city is constructed and narrated by intersections of race, nationality, disability, class, gender, sexual orientation and other social categories and status markers. We are particularly interested in work that addresses liminal or queer identities, urban borderlands (alleyways, bridges, roads, borders between neighborhoods) and experiences that operate in or between peripheral urban environments, from post-industrial zones in capital cities to (sub)urban environments that are situated outside the canonized capitals of modernity and postmodernity.”

Many thanks to the brilliant Patricia Garcia for hosting the conference, for bringing together exciting scholars from a range of background!

https://www.urbanfringes.com/fringe-alus-symposium

Out with Palgrave: our latest volume Literatures of Urban Possibility (eds. Salmela, Ameel & Finch). The book is the third volume in a trilogy of literary urban studies books that developed around the Association of Literary Urban Studies (previously Helsinki Literature and the City Network) and the international conferences we organized every other year. Earlier books were Literature and the Peripheral City (2015) and Literary Second Cities (2017).

Thanks to Markku and Jason, to all contributors and the participants in the conference (Im)Possible Cities in Tampere, to Palgrave and all encouraging members of ALUS in supporting work within literary urban studies!

Some of my personal favorites among the articles are “From Utopia to Retrotopia: The Cosmopolitan City in the Aftermath of Modernity” by Chen Bar-Itzhak, “Possibilities of Translocal Mapping in Tendai Huchu’s The Maestro, the Magistrate & the Mathematician” by Lena Mattheis (who recently published this brilliant monograph in our Literary Urban Studies series), and Anni Lappela’s “‘Cartographic Ecstasy’: Mapping, Provinciality and Possible Spaces in Dmitrii Danilov’s City Prose”.

Literatures of Urban Possibility also includes my latest article “Rising Towers, Rising Tides: Competing Visions of the Helsinki Waterfront in Planning and Fiction”. Abstract:

The final days 2020 saw the publication of my latest article, “The Destruction of Amsterdam: Flood Allegories in Contemporary Dutch Literature” in Tijdschrift voor Nederlandse Taal- en Letterkunde / Journal of Dutch Linguistics and Literature 136/4.

The article examines representations of urban destruction and of rising waters in Pieter Boskma’s poetry collection Tsunami in de Amstel (2016) and in Guido van Driel’s graphic novel De ondergang van Amsterdam (2007).

source: van Driel: De Ondergang van Amsterdam

The article is the second part of a triptych of articles I wrote on Low Countries urban flood narratives, with the other articles:

Ameel, Lieven & Stef Craps 2020: “Flooded Cities in Low Countries Fiction: Referentiality and Indeterminate Allegory in Renate Dorrestein’s Weerwater and Roderik Six’s Vloed”, published in Green Letters 24 (1): 36-50.

Ameel, Lieven 2021: “‘A Stream of Words’ – The Antwerp Quay Poem as Interrogation of Urban Open Form, Polyphony, and Radical Dialogue”, an article forthcoming in Textual Practice 2021, which examines Holvoet-Hanssen’s Antwerp Quay Poem, a public poem painted on the Antwerp flood walls in the early 2010s.

The articles are part of my research project on future visions of cities at the water in planning and fiction.

From the introduction of “The Destruction of Amsterdam”:

“The last years have seen a marked interest in representations of destructive climate change and flooding in literature (see e.g. Dobraszczyk 2017, Bracke & Ritson 2020), with a strong tendency in ecocritical approaches to read such representations in terms of their implications for understanding radical climatological and environmental change. In the context of Dutch literature, critics have foregrounded a perceived lack of such representations (Bracke 2016; see also Anker 2018; Craps & Mertens 2019; Rouckhout 2019). Pieter Boskma’s Tsunami in de Amstel (Tsunami in the Amstel) and Guido van Driel’s De ondergang van Amsterdam (The Destruction of Amsterdam), two contemporary texts that imagine a flooded Amsterdam, would seem to respond to this perceived lack of engagement with flooding on the part of Dutch literature. In Pieter Boskma’s poetry collection Tsunami in de Amstel (2016), rising waters, evoked in lofty iambic heptameters, flood Amsterdam until only a few iconic towers – the Westertoren; then the Rembrandttoren – are left standing. Similarly, in the elegantly painted panels of Guido van Driel’s graphic novel De ondergang van Amsterdam (2007), water is shown rising up from the earth to overwhelm the Netherlands’ first city, causing chaos and devastation. While Van Driel and Boskma draw in these works on contemporary tropes of radical climate change, the tropes of the flood and of urban destruction in both books are not easily recoverable for ecocritical readings. In a way that is closely bound up with the formal features of both works, something more complex than the vocalizing of climate concerns is at stake here, with Boskma and van Driel utilizing the trope of the flood to evoke a range of possible meanings, from personal reckoning with past poetics, reflections on loneliness and homelessness in the contemporary city, to metapoetical considerations about art’s ability to convey catastrophe.

This article examines representations of urban destruction and of rising waters in Boskma’s Tsunami in de Amstel and in van Driel’s De ondergang van Amsterdam, suggesting an allegorical reading of these tropes. I foreground the ways in which these texts reflect productively on visualisations and narrative frames of catastrophe, and how they propose alternative temporalities (in the case of Boskma) and alternative visual perspectives (in van Driel) for imagining possible urban end-times. The focus on allegorical readings is concomitant with an interest in the specific media utilized by Boskma and van Driel, with the ritualistic mode of the lyrical poem (cf. Culler 2017) and the subjectifying focalizations of the graphic novel (cf. Mikkonen 2017) arguably geared toward complex allegorical associations, rather than toward mimetic strategies. I will set out by a brief contextualization of flood representations in the Dutch context, and by outlining the groundwork for an allegorical reading of the trope of the flood.”

From the conclusion:

“In Boskma’s text, the potential presence of the reader is linked with the possibility to participate in the ritualistic properties (as outlined by Culler) of lyrical poetry, and in how they can participate in producing lyrical enunciations in a way that is coeval with the lyric I, or to identify with the addressee. In Boskma’s poetics, that enunciative function has demiurgic, world-creative properties, the power to awaken a world into being by the act of naming, as in the poem ‘Zonder Titel’ (p. 25). For all its metric prowess, the final, epic part, by contrast, evacuates such immediacy of presence. ‘Tsunami in de Amstel’, if anything, sketches the limits of the epic, narrative poem in contemporary treatment.

In van Driel’s De Ondergang van Amsterdam, the possibility of presence is one of aligning different perspectives and competing visualizations, and announced in the intricate mise-en-abyme in the opening panels: the protagonist looks at a painting to make sense of possible future destruction, while we as readers look at him, invited to consider both the possibility of destruction and the extent to which visual or narrative interpretations can give us access to possible future destruction. In the form of his graphic novel, then, van Driel has provided a tentative answer to the question Titus starts out from, in front of Rembrandt’s painting of the destruction of Jeruzalem: ‘kan ik mij daar iets bij voorstellen?’ (p. 6) – ‘is this something I can imagine?’”

source: van Driel: De Ondergang van Amsterdam

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I’d be happy to share a pdf of the article to anyone interested in my work – just contact me at lieven.ameel [a] tuni.fi