Thesis ID: CBB001567353

The Sanitized City and Other Urban Myths: Fantasies of Risk and Illness in the Twentieth Century Metropolis (2012)

unapi

Youssef, David Matthew (Author)


University of California, Los Angeles
Komar, Kathleen L
Hayles, N. Katherine
Kaufman, Eleanor
Komar, Kathleen L
Presner, Todd
Kaufman, Eleanor


Publication Date: 2012
Edition Details: Advisor: Hayles, N. Katherine, Presner, Todd; Committee Members: Kaufman, Eleanor, Komar, Kathleen L.
Physical Details: 336 pp.
Language: English

This project is oriented around a comparative analysis of cultural production concerning the metropolitan regions of Los Angeles and Berlin in the twentieth century. While combining approaches toward the history of science and medicine with film and literary studies, this dissertation analyzes the relationship between the increase in invisible risks within large urban centers, and the emergence of illnesses characterized by having undecidable causes (a confusion as to whether they originate from external causes or internal, potentially psychogenic ones.) The body of literature and film addressed in this project, ranging from the turn-of-the-century poetic prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, into 1920's expressionist film and literature in Weimar Berlin, to film noir and Frankfurt School philosophy during the World War II period in Los Angeles and finally to late twentieth century science fiction, explores the cultural effects and implications of the paradigm shift to bacteriology in modern medicine and disease pathology at the end of the nineteenth century. By tracing the experience of undecidable illness within film and literature, this project demonstrates how the paradigm of positivistic disease causation, which resulted from the discovery of the microbe, may have actually generated a radical insecurity within modern society, characterized by anxieties and fears of infection, to the point where many different kinds of psychosomatic, mimetic and psychogenic illnesses also became more widespread. Narrative accounts of undefined illness that were not yet understood scientifically often portrayed experiences of urban community as a collection of anxious impressions of the larger networks of metropolitan infrastructure and the increasing interconnections between multiple individuals which it facilitates, including an invisible dimension of microbiology. These narratives emphasize how urban infrastructure can convey the ineffable presence of "spectral" dangers.

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Description Cited in Dissertation Abstracts International-A 74/04(E), Oct 2013. Proquest Document ID: 1267746945.


Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001567353/

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Authors & Contributors
Steve Howard
Mokake, Flavius M.
Sean W. Maher
Zurbrigg, Sheila
Yip, Ka-che
Tatsumi, Takayuki
Concepts
Disease and diseases
Public health
Medicine and society
Motion pictures; cinema; movies
Science fiction
Science and literature
Time Periods
20th century
19th century
21st century
18th century
17th century
Places
Los Angeles (California)
London (England)
United States
Berlin (Germany)
Lagos, Nigeria
Cameroon (Country)
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