Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture

<p><em>Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture</em> inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify the connections between race space class and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down from the body the ground zero of spatiality to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener on Wall Street to the striated spaces of internment camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany NY during the Depression to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives the volume reveals how beyond the boundaries that characterize each space every location has loose ends that are impossible to contain.</p>