Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 24
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Popular Culture Review
deployed as a “contained”, “enclosed”, and above all, separate urban space. Yet it
also functions as a tool that can define or “narrate” surrounding city space in various
ways.
The practice of narrating space ties in with Jam eson’s landmark essay
“Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (1984). On his
attempted tour of the Bonaventure Hotel, Jameson refers to architectural theory’s
borrowing from narrative analysis in order to create a discourse of human movement
through architecturally constructed spaces. Using such a discourse, movement
through such spaces can be recounted as an “attempt to see our physical
trajectories...as virtual narratives o f stories, as dynamic paths and narrative
paradigms which we as visitors are asked to complete with our own bodies and
movements” (Jameson 82). Jameson attempts this tour of the Bonaventure Hotel,
but its “postmodern” spaces foil his pursuit to linearly map a clear trajectory through
it, and similarly hamper his efforts to narrate his own journey in his critical essay
recounting his experience. It has often been pointed ou Ёѡ