Concrete-Jungle: Reading Nature in Representations of New York City

Abstract

Concrete-Jungle: Reading Nature in Representations of New York City explores evolving conceptions of nature in representations of New York City and its "concrete jungle" mythology. It employs a geocritical approach which privileges the spatial, rather than temporal, organisation of an archive which spans from circa 1800 to 2025 in recognition that NYC, as both presentation and re-presentation, is a hyperobject (massively distributed in time and space). Excavating transhistorical signs from this archive yields novel readings of literature which productively complicate conventions of genre, discipline, and periodisation. My first chapter performs an exegesis of the ‘concrete-jungle’, with a focus on Stephen Crane’s George’s Mother (1896) and Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987); my second chapter explores the category of ‘weed’ as outlaw, excrescence, and revolutionary in the writings of Andrew Jackson Downing, Henry James, and Edith Wharton; my third chapter tracks a tiger through the five boroughs since 1613, with a focus on Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City (2009); and my final chapter employs systems theory to read climate management in representations of NYC from 1890 to 2020, with a focus on Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140 (2017). This project reveals the methods through which representation naturalises urban development and socioeconomic organisation to thereby posit literature as a medium through which we might rethink and resist this process. At the same time, it argues that we might reevaluate our relationship with nature (whatever it means) even from the ruby-red steps of Manhattan’s Times Square