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Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 20 page paper provides an overview of Jonathan Raban's Soft City, which can be described as a social commentary and philosophical assessment of the changes in the urban world. The conceptual views created by Raban in the early 1970s marked a significant shift and the adoption of a modernist perspective on urbanization that created a category of modernist or early postmodernist urban authorship. Bibliography lists 10 sources.
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20 pages (~225 words per page)
File: MH11_MHSoftCi.rtf
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of a modernist perspective on urbanization that created a category of modernist or early postmodernist urban authorship. Raban wrote: "In the city, we are barraged with images
of the people we might become. Identity is presented as plastic, a matter of possessions and appearances: and a very large proposition of the urban landscape is taken up
by slogans, advertisements, flatly photographed images of folk heroes--the man who turned into a sophisticated dandy by drinking a brand of vodka, the girl who transformed herself into a
latter-day Mata Hari with a squirt of cheap scent" (59). This image of the "soft city" suggests that the modern identity in the urban world may in fact relate
a lack of substance, to a kind of superficiality that is defined within the urban setting. In considering this supposition, though, it is necessary to assess the modernist perspective
that has shaped reflections on the urban identity over the last half century and the implications for the era in which Raban wrote, the transformational 1970s. The
Concept of the Soft City Raban reflected upon a number of factors that he clearly believed related to the postmodernist identity in the 1970s, including the nature of the urban
centers and the changes that occurred in the national identity. Raban wrote: "For the new arrival, this disordered abundance is the citys most evident and alarming quality" (61).
Raban was referring to the emerging qualities of the industrial urban center, the excesses of personal lives surrounded by the opposite extreme, poverty. But Raban appears to suggest
that this is a product of the general identity of modernity. "Personal identify has always been rooted in property, but hitherto the relationship has been a simple one--a question
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