Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-APR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

Modernity and Metropolis: Writing, Film and Urban Formations. By PETER BROOKER. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave. 2002. ix+230 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-333-80168-7.

This book begins from the position that modernity and the city need to be considered in terms of a dynamic interrelationship between space and time. In analyzing predominantly literary and cinematic constructions of the city, Brooker focuses on urban sites as loci of spatio-temporal difference and process where local and global intersect, and where reworkings of the past and imaginings of the future coexist. Brooker refuses a separation between modernity and postmodernity as categories or temporalities. Instead, he argues that modernity looks back reflexively at the Enlightenment thought which was its precondition, and looks forward at the...

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