City Scripts/City Scapes: On the Intertextuality of Urban Experience

Abstract

Drawing on the idea that our experience of a city is to a large degree grounded intertextually on previous readings about this city, the chapter discusses the relation between (extratextual) city scapes and (textual) city scripts both as one that tries to make us believe that the city script mimetically, and literally, represents a (seemingly preexistent) city scape, and as one that performatively, and prospectively, presents a city scape through the script right in front of our eyes. In doing so, it retraces the decisive nineteenth-century poetological shift from world-making to text-making that can above all be observed in the move of (not only urban) poetry into modernity.