ABSTRACT
“Palimpsests, Rhizomes, Nodes: Texts as Structural and Functional Urban Models” continues the inquiry into texts as models of the city. It builds on the typology developed in Chapter 2 to provide theoretical concepts and extended case studies for the analysis of texts as structural and functional models of urban complexities. More specifically, using T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” as a quintessential topographical poem and as a central text in discussions of urban memory, and Norman Klein’s 2003 BIB-061 multimedia database narrative Bleeding Through: Layers of Los Angeles 1920–1986 BIB-056 as arguably one of the most ambitious attempts at using hypertext database structures to represent urban complexities, the chapter discusses textual strategies of simulating rhizomatic and palimpsestic urban structures as well as textual simulations of cities as spatialised and layered urban memory. Here, Walter Benjamin’s notion of “superposition”, the simultaneous perception of different layers of the past, plays a central role.
