@inbook{c1052f91f8a54120b7510b38ac0a5d98,
title = "Intersections: Streets and Other Democratic Spaces",
abstract = "This chapter explores urban prose, poetry and painting that moves from sense impressions encountered on city streets to implicit and explicit statements about American social and political conditions. A strain in American culture, from Ashcan School painting through James Baldwin{\textquoteright}s mid-century essays on Harlem to Don DeLillo{\textquoteright}s set-piece performative protests, insists that the nation{\textquoteright}s politics take shape and moods register on city streets. The chapter argues that certain, primarily literary, forms, through their close attention to and lucid expression of the way streets feel, offer access and insight into experiences that range from jostling crowds through organized protests to violent confrontations. Where the fl{\^a}neur pursues urban aesthetics and fleeting impressions in the spirit of leisured dilettantism, Henry James restlessly analyses early-twentieth-century New York{\textquoteright}s metropolitan scale; insiders and outsiders probe the tensions that shape and define ethnic enclaves; and in Tillie Olsen{\textquoteright}s strike journalism and E. L. Doctorow{\textquoteright}s political fiction pre- and post- Second World War mass protests are at once inspiring and monstrous. Where Doctorow and DeLillo describe a postmodern withdrawal from the street as a site of meaning, the chapter ends with its re-emergence with Occupy and other twenty-first-century protest movements.",
keywords = "impression, fl{\^a}neur, politics, protest, crowds, community, activism, street",
author = "John Fagg",
year = "2021",
month = aug,
day = "6",
doi = "10.1017/9781108895262.003",
language = "English",
isbn = "9781108841962",
series = "Cambridge Themes in American Literature and Culture",
publisher = "Cambridge University Press",
pages = "33--56",
editor = "McNamara, {Kevin R.}",
booktitle = "The City in American Literature and Culture",
}