Tales of the City A Study of Narrative and Urban Life [Hardcover]

This 1998 anthropological study uses narrative and urban theory to analyse a range of stories about the city.This book recounts and analyses a number of stories of the city: the academics' abstract tales, concrete stories about a specific place (Milton Keynes, that symbol of 'the urban'), and, especially, the self narrations of its some of its residents. It examines the narrative conventions and cultural implications of this multiplicity of stories and story telling, and relates them to profound myths about urban life, community and individual creativity. Drawing on recent work in narrative studies, urban theory, and cultural studies, it will be of particular interest to cultural anthropologists.This book recounts and analyses a number of stories of the city: the academics' abstract tales, concrete stories about a specific place (Milton Keynes, that symbol of 'the urban'), and, especially, the self narrations of its some of its residents. It examines the narrative conventions and cultural implications of this multiplicity of stories and story telling, and relates them to profound myths about urban life, community and individual creativity. Drawing on recent work in narrative studies, urban theory, and cultural studies, it will be of particular interest to cultural anthropologists.How do we picture urban life and formulate our experience of it? Tales of the City brings together the academics' abstract tales with the vivid stories about a particular city, Milton Keynes, and the often moving self narrations of its residents. It explores the role of story-telling processes for the creative constructing of experience, with particular attention to personal narrations. The story that is now emerging, told by many individual actor narrators, is of the city as a natural setting for human life, in stark contrast to the pessimistic anti-urban tales of many academic narrators. Drawing on narrative studies, cultural and linguistic anthropology and social theory, Professor FinneglC%