City Water: Urban Rivers as Cultural Infrastructure Restricted; Files Only

Abstract

Over the last two centuries in the U.S. and around the world, urban rivers and their tributaries have undergone dramatic transformations. From open-air streams that urban dwellers had near daily interaction with, urban rivers have become highly controlled and commodified resources, used as water supply and receptacles for pollution. City Water: Urban Rivers as Cultural Infrastructure examines what that transformation has meant for the cultural role of urban water in the contemporary era. It argues that urban rivers act as cultural infrastructure—both a site for reading a city’s identity and values and an influence on narrative forms themselves. This project examines rhetorical patterns in newspapers, tracking how they construct narratives that commodify and flatten rivers’ meaning, alongside readings of novels, films, and public art in which that flattening is questioned and made strange, and in which, occasionally, the life of the river is recognized. Examining the South and Flint Rivers (in Atlanta), the Los Angeles River, the New York Estuary, and the Elbe River (in Germany), this project learns from specific watery places and relational networks.

City Water has implications for infrastructure studies, eco-criticism and blue humanities, contemporary literature, and digital humanities. The project extends the work of Lauren Berlant and Jessica Hurley, who recognize how narratives affect infrastructure and how infrastructure influences narrative forms, to apply to the recent history of urban water control and commodification. Bringing this infrastructural understanding to the environmental and blue humanities, the project provides a rationale for using case studies from urban nature scenes to deepen an understanding of environmental agency and personhood. City Water’s approach to environmental study is influenced by postcolonial Indigenous scholarship, which sees environmental capture and control as an ongoing process of commodification (and colonization), separating water and land from their relations. Finally, this project intervenes in digital humanities and contemporary literature by using a unique digital humanistic method to “close read at scale” newspapers in order to provide historical and political contexts for literary readings. 

Table of Contents

Table of contents

Preface…………………………………………………………………………………………..…1

Introduction………………………………………………………………..……………….….....22

A Note on Method………………………………………………………………………………..43

Chapter One: Los Angeles River, Recursive History………………………………………………………...…51

Chapter Two: The New York Estuary, Future Teller…………………………………………………...……….91

Chapter Three: The Elbe River, “And the River Had Not Forgotten How”………………………………….....128

Conclusion: The Rights of Urban Rivers…………………………………………………………………….169

Works Cited………………………………………………………………………………….…180

About this Dissertation

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School	Laney Graduate School
Department	Comparative Literature
Degree	Ph.D.
Submission	Dissertation
Language	English
Research Field	Literature, General Environmental Studies Climate Change
Keyword	L.A. River close reading at scale Weelaunee Christa Wolf climate fiction urban rivers ecocriticism Elbe River blue humanities topic modeling Atlanta contemporary literature New York Estuary digital humanities
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Angelika Bammer, Emory University
Committee Members	Lauren Klein, Emory University Caroline Schaumann, Emory University Dan Sinykin, Emory University

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