Memory and the Built Environment in 20th-Century American Literature

"From the creation of the G.I. Bill in 1944 to President Nixon's 1973 announcement that direct federal support for building public housing was over, the postwar era in the United States saw a wave of changes that had an enduring impact on the development of cities. Focusing on the relationship between processes of demolition and restoration as they have shaped the modern built environment, and the processes by which memory is constructed, hidden, or remade in the literary text, this book explores the ways in which history becomes entangled with the urban space in which it plays out. Alice Levick takes stock of this history, both in the form of its externalised, concretised manifestation and its more symbolic representation, as depicted in the work of of post-war writers. Calling upon privileged access to archival material and interviews with New York academics, city historians and urban planners, this book locates Freud's 'Uncanny' in the cracks between the absent and present, invisible and the visible, memory and history as they are presented in city narratives, demonstrating both the passage of time and the imposition of 20th-century modernism. With reference to the works of D.J. Waldie, Joan Didion, Raymond Chandler, Marshall Berman, L. J. Davis and Paula Fox, Memory and Built Environment in 20th-Century American Literature unpacks how time becomes visible in Los Angeles, Sacramento, Lakewood and New York in the decades just before and after the Second World War, questioning how they provide access, in narrative and spatial forms, to the past, and how, at times, that access is blocked."--