ABSTRACT
A popular contemporary perception of the USA is as a vast city recreated from half-remembered fragments of films, television dramas, popular music and a thousand advertising images. Quite simply, American cities appear to be all around us, from the opening sequences of CSI’s Las Vegas Strip to the futuristic Los Angeles of Blade Runner or the fashionable upmarket lofts and galleries of Sex and the City. This is only one aspect of how we imagine America, but it is, for many of us, the most attractive, engaging and threatening aspect of the country. However, despite the constant presence of American cities in our lives, regardless of where we live, they remain mysterious and unknowable, like a familiar text that we seem to possess but whose final meaning evades us as we attempt to read it. This idea may sound rather odd. After all, how can a city be a text? But a city is a gathering of meanings in which people invest their interpretations and seek to create their own (hi)story, and therefore resembles a text. A city is constructed like a text, it is ‘an inscription of man [and woman] in space’ (Barthes 1988: 193), unfolding, challenging, confusing, thrilling and threatening all at the same time. When Joyce Carol Oates asked in 1981, ‘If the City is a text, how shall we read it?’ (Jaye and Watts 1981: 11), she expressed this fascination with the need to comprehend the very product of our own creation which had somehow become mysterious. It is these different layers of meaning within the city that are hard to fathom, and which vary depending on where you read them from: high and low, inner city or suburb, skyscraper or street level, uptown or the ghetto, inside or out, feminine or masculine, rich or poor, and so on. These differing points of view explain the endless possibility of the city for artists and the fascination for historians and sociologists studying its meanings.
