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The city has long occupied a unique position in culture and politics as a space in which social conflict is believed to proliferate. That conflict is sometimes celebrated and sometimes feared, but in either case, the city and representations of the city invite analysis of the ways in which social struggles produce the places within and through which systems of power, identity structures, and national imaginaries are created, refined, redefined, or even destroyed. As poststructuralist theorists of space like David Harvey and Doreen Massey have taught us, a political practice cannot be dissociated from a politics of space and place.1 And, as Franco Moretti has taught us, literature cannot be disassociated from the political and geographic spaces it imagines.2 The city in particular creates peculiar problems and opportunities for literature because it is so often conceived of as a space that resists representation. While an unbridgeable gap between representation (the sign) and the thing being represented (the referent) is inevitable-indeed, Lacan, whose theories of language and subjectivity will figure heavily in my argument, posits this chasm as the constitutive feature of subjectivity - the city tends to highlight that gap. Moreover, that gap also tends to provoke anxiety over the city's apparent resistance to political control. Anthony Vidler explains the problem: "How does one make sense of a city that offers no visual or conceptual unity, that seems to offend all the laws of aesthetics and reason, but that nevertheless demands reform?"3
Creating order out of the perceived chaos of the city has been a problem for both literature and politics. However, according to David Harvey in Rebel Cities (2012), it is precisely the intrinsic and overwhelming heterogeneity of the city as well as its resistance to political control that make it a potential seedbed for the development of a revolutionary political practice. In the city, he explains, "there are already multiple practices within the urban that themselves are full to overflowing with alternative possibilities."4 Similarly, in literary practice, recent approaches to reading the city, such as Julian Wolfrey's polemic in the Writing London series (1998-2004), jettison the longing for order that motivated the eighteenth-century anxiety about the city detailed by Vidler and instead embrace the city's resistance to representation.5 This approach to reading the...