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David Pike

American University, CAS Department of Literature, Faculty Member

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David L. Pike teaches literature and film at American University. Before coming to American, he received a B.A. in Film, Literature, and Critical Theory from Swarthmore College, an M.A. in French and Romance Philology and a PhD in Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Heyman Center for the Humanities. His most recent book is Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World (U of Toronto P, 2012). Earlier books include Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800-2001; Subterranean Cities: The World Beneath Paris and London, 1800-1945; and Passage Through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds, all from Cornell University Press. He is co-author of Literature: A World of Writing (Pearson, 2nd ed. 2012) and co-editor of the Longman Anthology of World Literature, and has published widely on 19th- and 20th-century urban literature, culture, and film.
Phone: (202) 885-2996
Address: Department of Literature
American University
4400 Massachusetts Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20016-8047

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Philipp Staufer

University of Ulster

Kansas State University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

Christopher Meir

Universidad Carlos III de Madrid

Stephane Tonnelat

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique / French National Centre for Scientific Research

Manfred Malzahn

United Arab Emirates University

Kati (Katalin) Prajda

University of Vienna

George Mason University

Jose M. Faraldo

Universidad Complutense de Madrid

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Subterranean Cities & Metropolis on the Styx by David Pike

Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945

The literary and visual imagination of underground sites in the industrialized city, and their si... more

Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001

Subterranean space and the vertical city as a mode for representing modernity. Four parts: theory... more

Armchair Undergrounds: Jules Verne and Subterranean Tourism

Dix-Neuf, 2019

This article analyses ways in which questions of nineteenth-century tourism manifest themselves i... more This article analyses ways in which questions of nineteenth-century
tourism manifest themselves in certain of Jules Verne’s Voyages
extraordinaires. In particular, it discusses several tensions within
the form of these novels: (1) within developing practices of
tourism encompassed by John Urry’s concept of the ‘tourist gaze’
and a contrary set of practices we might term by analogy the
‘engineer’s gaze’; (2) between standard sites of tourist itineraries
and those hidden from the light of day; (3) the alternation of the
latter tourism between two modes: the armchair tourism offered
by Verne’s novels and other fictional and nonfictional works of the
period and their perilous exploration by privileged individuals. The
article uses Verne’s fiction to unpack these three tensions in order
to get at what is at stake in the rise of new modes of tourism
during the nineteenth century. The article concludes by
considering implications for the rise in what we might term ‘dark’
Victorianism at the end of the twentieth century.

Commuting to Another World: Spaces of Transport and Transport Maps in Urban Fantasy

In fantasy and science fiction more than any other genres of fiction, mapping is an essential sup... more In fantasy and science fiction more than any other genres of fiction, mapping is an essential supplement, and often a precursor to, the standard creative process of character development and plotting. This chapter examines a particular kind of mapping, the particular kinds of spaces it maps, and the peculiar imaginary surrounding it: the urban transport system and its relationship to the contemporary sub-genre of urban fantasy with which it has emerged. The chapter considers a range of texts by writers including China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Laurence Leonard, Michael de Larrabeiti, Neal Shusterman, Suzanne Collins, and Lauren Beuke. It concludes with a brief analysis Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988) and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006).

“As Above, So Below: Paris Catacombs,” “Waste and Work: New York Sewers,” “Repressed Wastes: London Sewers.”

Three short essays in the volume, Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within. Ed. Paul Dobraszc... more

Modernist Space and the Transformation of Underground London

so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into fururiry. -H. G.'\Xl'ells, TheTime... more so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into fururiry. -H. G.'\Xl'ells, TheTime Machine d\r:Tr.:, historian Eric Hobsbawm recently characterized Harry t f Beckt schematic map of the London l-Jnderground as "the mosr L original work of avanr-garde art in Britain berween the wars" (3g-39) (see "i). It certainly represenrs a perfect marriage of abstract desþ and practical utility' By simplif ing the complex .erwork of urban raüway ünìs into a visually pleasing and easily legibte map bearing little or no relation to either the experiential or the physical metropolis of London, Beck codified a parac_ ulrrþ modernist conceprion of space. unchanged in its basic design since ûrst sketched in 1,93L, the rube map is argaably the predomin*t rrrriorry i*.g.

'Down by the Dark Arches’: A Cultural History of the Adelphi.

Paris Souterrain: Before and After the Revolution

This essay argues that the late decades of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a signific... more This essay argues that the late decades of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a significant shift in spatial representation in Paris, when what had been one mode among the many available to the early modern Parisian for making sense of his or her city was well on its way to becoming the dominant interpretative framework that we now term modernity. It seeks to establish how and why the nineteenth century transformed the early modern experience of the underground into the dominant nineteenth-century discourse of Paris souterrain. The essay begins by reconstructing a picture of the early modern Paris underground distinct from its nineteenth-century representation. The second part of the essay examines the changing representation of these same spaces in the nineteenth century and their centrality to the newly verticalized conception of the cityscape of Paris. The essay concludes by suggesting some particular reasons why the specific imagery of Paris souterrain would turn out to be so well suited to making sense of the changes of modernity as a whole.

Sewage Treatments: Vertical Space and Waste in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London

he exploitation of subterranean space played a formative role in the nineteenth-century city. Fro... more he exploitation of subterranean space played a formative role in the nineteenth-century city. From the technological novelty of its metropolitan railways, tunnels, arches, t and embankments to its mobilization to conceptualize an urban society divided between rich and poor, law abiding and criminal, healthy and diseased, familiar and foreign, the vertical city was a heady mix of physical fact and social fantasy.l Different types of underground spâce combined matter with metaphor in different fashions; this essay focuses on perhaps the most conflicted of them all, the drainage system.2 While the underground railway for example, established the urban underground as a novel site for everyday travel by all classes, the sewer remained closely associated with mlthic and religious traditions of the epochal, life-altering trip to the underworld. The Paris Métro and the London Underground presented a forwardlooking image of urban space as a perfectly controlled network of interlocking tunnels; the sewer operated to channel anything considered backwardlooking and recidivist through its conduits and out of the city altogether.

‘The Greatest Wonder of the World’: Brunel’s Tunnel and the Meanings of Underground London

The Walt Disney World Underground

This article has grown out of a larger project on representations of subterranean space in the mo... more This article has grown out of a larger project on representations of subterranean space in the modern city. It explores the meanings of the "utilidors," the underground infrastructure of the Magic Kingdom, within the broader experience of the space of Walt Disney World. It relates this experience to a particular mode of representing the modern city as divided between its respectable, aboveground spaces and its hidden, underground spaces. The author concludes by suggesting some of the insights the power of Disney's spatial divisions can provide in thinking about current images of the city as simultaneously a site of "Disneyfication" (e.g., the new Times Square) and as a place of ruin, crime, and decay.

Streetwalking, Underground London, and the Urban Vision of The Secret Agent

Underground Theater: Subterranean Spaces on the London Stage

Rev. of Matthew Beaumont, Night Walking: A Nocturnal History of London.pdf

Victorian Studies, 2017

Rev. essay on Andrea Goulet, Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016).

s fascinating book begins in North America with the birth of the modern detective story on a Poe-... more s fascinating book begins in North America with the birth of the modern detective story on a Poe-imagined street in Paris; it concludes on the same continent with Montreal-based Maurice Dantec's cyberpunk novel of a fragmented detective traversing a deterritorialized postapocalyptic Europe, its Paris an empty space on a useless map. In between, Goulet ranges widely through French detective fiction, from canonical figures such as Émile Gaboriau, Gaston Leroux, Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, and Léo Malet, through heretofore unidentified sub-genres such as "catacomb crime fictions" and "street-name mysteries" to the "metatextual play" of the nouveau roman and the "anti-'crime novels'" of "cyber-noir." The strength of the book comes from its innovative organization around space and spatial representations: the two main sections analyze vertical and horizontal conceptions of space in terms of "geological" and "cartographic" imaginaries, respectively; a shorter, bridging chapter discusses the city street as "intersection" between these two imaginaries. But there is much more. Goulet is centrally concerned with the permutations undergone by several binaries during the roughly century-and-a-half that her book spans: the local and the global, individual and national identity, and the private and the political. She also considers the emerging discourse of modern science and the poststructuralist dynamic of the destabilization of a totalizing and referential spatiotemporal order through the eruption or "'shadow-space' of cartographic disorder, brutality, and crime" (p. 229). This is a lot to juggle within 250 pages, and Goulet does an impressive job of keeping in play the myriad intersecting elements in her study. For mostly idiosyncratic reasons-I am not professionally or personally invested in the genre of detective fiction per se, and most of the popular fiction I read is Anglophone or global rather than French-I found the central argument of the book regarding French detective fiction less compelling than the farther-flung places where it begins and ends, the questions that emerge from the many nooks and crannies it peeked into along the way, and the methodological challenges Goulet's approach raises for my own interests in subterranean studies, film, urban cultural studies, and the slum/urban poverty imaginary. These questions and issues are what I discuss below.

Review of Nicholas Daly, The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York

Rev. of Sunny Stalter-Pace, Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P)

Review essay on Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City; Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities; Julian Wolfreys, Writing London

the fingers, the arching of the knuckles, the distressed searching of the tips for relief to the ... more

Rev. of Paul Dobraszczyk, Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (Reading: Spire Books, 2009).

hope that this fine scholar will allow herself more room to explore the richness of the material ... more hope that this fine scholar will allow herself more room to explore the richness of the material she has discovered and to share more of it with her readers. I cannot help wishing, for instance, that the textual space taken up by conclusions that outline the contents of each chapter might have been devoted, instead, to giving us more examples of the powerful and evocative language of the men and women who lived in and remembered victorian homes. Beryl Lee Booker, for instance, recalls that the wallpaper in her mother's room was "covered with bunches of violets or lilacs," and that "mother rustled and glittered around her beautiful bedroom" (qtd. in Hamlett 117).

Rev. of David Welsh, Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf (Liverpool UP, 2010)

Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945

The literary and visual imagination of underground sites in the industrialized city, and their si... more

Metropolis on the Styx: The Underworlds of Modern Urban Culture, 1800–2001

Subterranean space and the vertical city as a mode for representing modernity. Four parts: theory... more

Armchair Undergrounds: Jules Verne and Subterranean Tourism

Dix-Neuf, 2019

This article analyses ways in which questions of nineteenth-century tourism manifest themselves i... more This article analyses ways in which questions of nineteenth-century
tourism manifest themselves in certain of Jules Verne’s Voyages
extraordinaires. In particular, it discusses several tensions within
the form of these novels: (1) within developing practices of
tourism encompassed by John Urry’s concept of the ‘tourist gaze’
and a contrary set of practices we might term by analogy the
‘engineer’s gaze’; (2) between standard sites of tourist itineraries
and those hidden from the light of day; (3) the alternation of the
latter tourism between two modes: the armchair tourism offered
by Verne’s novels and other fictional and nonfictional works of the
period and their perilous exploration by privileged individuals. The
article uses Verne’s fiction to unpack these three tensions in order
to get at what is at stake in the rise of new modes of tourism
during the nineteenth century. The article concludes by
considering implications for the rise in what we might term ‘dark’
Victorianism at the end of the twentieth century.

Commuting to Another World: Spaces of Transport and Transport Maps in Urban Fantasy

In fantasy and science fiction more than any other genres of fiction, mapping is an essential sup... more In fantasy and science fiction more than any other genres of fiction, mapping is an essential supplement, and often a precursor to, the standard creative process of character development and plotting. This chapter examines a particular kind of mapping, the particular kinds of spaces it maps, and the peculiar imaginary surrounding it: the urban transport system and its relationship to the contemporary sub-genre of urban fantasy with which it has emerged. The chapter considers a range of texts by writers including China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, Laurence Leonard, Michael de Larrabeiti, Neal Shusterman, Suzanne Collins, and Lauren Beuke. It concludes with a brief analysis Michael Moorcock’s Mother London (1988) and Thomas Pynchon’s Against the Day (2006).

“As Above, So Below: Paris Catacombs,” “Waste and Work: New York Sewers,” “Repressed Wastes: London Sewers.”

Three short essays in the volume, Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within. Ed. Paul Dobraszc... more

Modernist Space and the Transformation of Underground London

so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into fururiry. -H. G.'\Xl'ells, TheTime... more so with a kind of madness growing upon me, I flung myself into fururiry. -H. G.'\Xl'ells, TheTime Machine d\r:Tr.:, historian Eric Hobsbawm recently characterized Harry t f Beckt schematic map of the London l-Jnderground as "the mosr L original work of avanr-garde art in Britain berween the wars" (3g-39) (see "i). It certainly represenrs a perfect marriage of abstract desþ and practical utility' By simplif ing the complex .erwork of urban raüway ünìs into a visually pleasing and easily legibte map bearing little or no relation to either the experiential or the physical metropolis of London, Beck codified a parac_ ulrrþ modernist conceprion of space. unchanged in its basic design since ûrst sketched in 1,93L, the rube map is argaably the predomin*t rrrriorry i*.g.

'Down by the Dark Arches’: A Cultural History of the Adelphi.

Paris Souterrain: Before and After the Revolution

This essay argues that the late decades of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a signific... more This essay argues that the late decades of the eighteenth century saw the beginning of a significant shift in spatial representation in Paris, when what had been one mode among the many available to the early modern Parisian for making sense of his or her city was well on its way to becoming the dominant interpretative framework that we now term modernity. It seeks to establish how and why the nineteenth century transformed the early modern experience of the underground into the dominant nineteenth-century discourse of Paris souterrain. The essay begins by reconstructing a picture of the early modern Paris underground distinct from its nineteenth-century representation. The second part of the essay examines the changing representation of these same spaces in the nineteenth century and their centrality to the newly verticalized conception of the cityscape of Paris. The essay concludes by suggesting some particular reasons why the specific imagery of Paris souterrain would turn out to be so well suited to making sense of the changes of modernity as a whole.

Sewage Treatments: Vertical Space and Waste in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London

he exploitation of subterranean space played a formative role in the nineteenth-century city. Fro... more he exploitation of subterranean space played a formative role in the nineteenth-century city. From the technological novelty of its metropolitan railways, tunnels, arches, t and embankments to its mobilization to conceptualize an urban society divided between rich and poor, law abiding and criminal, healthy and diseased, familiar and foreign, the vertical city was a heady mix of physical fact and social fantasy.l Different types of underground spâce combined matter with metaphor in different fashions; this essay focuses on perhaps the most conflicted of them all, the drainage system.2 While the underground railway for example, established the urban underground as a novel site for everyday travel by all classes, the sewer remained closely associated with mlthic and religious traditions of the epochal, life-altering trip to the underworld. The Paris Métro and the London Underground presented a forwardlooking image of urban space as a perfectly controlled network of interlocking tunnels; the sewer operated to channel anything considered backwardlooking and recidivist through its conduits and out of the city altogether.

‘The Greatest Wonder of the World’: Brunel’s Tunnel and the Meanings of Underground London

The Walt Disney World Underground

This article has grown out of a larger project on representations of subterranean space in the mo... more This article has grown out of a larger project on representations of subterranean space in the modern city. It explores the meanings of the "utilidors," the underground infrastructure of the Magic Kingdom, within the broader experience of the space of Walt Disney World. It relates this experience to a particular mode of representing the modern city as divided between its respectable, aboveground spaces and its hidden, underground spaces. The author concludes by suggesting some of the insights the power of Disney's spatial divisions can provide in thinking about current images of the city as simultaneously a site of "Disneyfication" (e.g., the new Times Square) and as a place of ruin, crime, and decay.

Streetwalking, Underground London, and the Urban Vision of The Secret Agent

Underground Theater: Subterranean Spaces on the London Stage

Rev. of Matthew Beaumont, Night Walking: A Nocturnal History of London.pdf

Victorian Studies, 2017

Rev. essay on Andrea Goulet, Legacies of the Rue Morgue: Science, Space, and Crime Fiction in France (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2016).

s fascinating book begins in North America with the birth of the modern detective story on a Poe-... more s fascinating book begins in North America with the birth of the modern detective story on a Poe-imagined street in Paris; it concludes on the same continent with Montreal-based Maurice Dantec's cyberpunk novel of a fragmented detective traversing a deterritorialized postapocalyptic Europe, its Paris an empty space on a useless map. In between, Goulet ranges widely through French detective fiction, from canonical figures such as Émile Gaboriau, Gaston Leroux, Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre, and Léo Malet, through heretofore unidentified sub-genres such as "catacomb crime fictions" and "street-name mysteries" to the "metatextual play" of the nouveau roman and the "anti-'crime novels'" of "cyber-noir." The strength of the book comes from its innovative organization around space and spatial representations: the two main sections analyze vertical and horizontal conceptions of space in terms of "geological" and "cartographic" imaginaries, respectively; a shorter, bridging chapter discusses the city street as "intersection" between these two imaginaries. But there is much more. Goulet is centrally concerned with the permutations undergone by several binaries during the roughly century-and-a-half that her book spans: the local and the global, individual and national identity, and the private and the political. She also considers the emerging discourse of modern science and the poststructuralist dynamic of the destabilization of a totalizing and referential spatiotemporal order through the eruption or "'shadow-space' of cartographic disorder, brutality, and crime" (p. 229). This is a lot to juggle within 250 pages, and Goulet does an impressive job of keeping in play the myriad intersecting elements in her study. For mostly idiosyncratic reasons-I am not professionally or personally invested in the genre of detective fiction per se, and most of the popular fiction I read is Anglophone or global rather than French-I found the central argument of the book regarding French detective fiction less compelling than the farther-flung places where it begins and ends, the questions that emerge from the many nooks and crannies it peeked into along the way, and the methodological challenges Goulet's approach raises for my own interests in subterranean studies, film, urban cultural studies, and the slum/urban poverty imaginary. These questions and issues are what I discuss below.

Review of Nicholas Daly, The Demographic Imagination and the Nineteenth-Century City: Paris, London, New York

Rev. of Sunny Stalter-Pace, Underground Movements: Modern Culture on the New York City Subway (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P)

Review essay on Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City; Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities; Julian Wolfreys, Writing London

the fingers, the arching of the knuckles, the distressed searching of the tips for relief to the ... more

Rev. of Paul Dobraszczyk, Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers (Reading: Spire Books, 2009).

hope that this fine scholar will allow herself more room to explore the richness of the material ... more hope that this fine scholar will allow herself more room to explore the richness of the material she has discovered and to share more of it with her readers. I cannot help wishing, for instance, that the textual space taken up by conclusions that outline the contents of each chapter might have been devoted, instead, to giving us more examples of the powerful and evocative language of the men and women who lived in and remembered victorian homes. Beryl Lee Booker, for instance, recalls that the wallpaper in her mother's room was "covered with bunches of violets or lilacs," and that "mother rustled and glittered around her beautiful bedroom" (qtd. in Hamlett 117).

Rev. of David Welsh, Underground Writing: The London Tube from George Gissing to Virginia Woolf (Liverpool UP, 2010)

Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades

Oxford University Press, 2021

Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods i... more Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s: The Bunkered Decades studies the two periods in which Americans were actively encouraged to excavate their own backyards while governments the world over exhausted their budgets on fortified super-shelters and megaton bombs. The dreams and nightmares inspired by the spectre of nuclear destruction were expressed in images and forms from comics, movies, and pulp paperbacks to policy documents, protest movements, and survivalist tracts. Illustrated with photographs, artwork, and movie and television stills of real and imagined fallout shelters and other bunker fantasies, award-winning author David L. Pike's continues his decades-long exploration of the meanings of modern undergrounds. Ranging widely across disciplines, this volume finds unexpected connections between cultural icons and forgotten texts, plumbs the bunker's stratifications of class, region, race, and gender, and traces the often unrecognized through-lines leading from the 1960s and the less-studied 1980s into the present. Although the Cold War ended over 30 years ago, its legacy looms large in anxieties around security, borders, and all manners of imminent apocalypse. Treating the bunker in its concrete presence and in its flightiest fantasies while attending equally to its uniquely American desires and pathologies and to its global impact, Cold War Space and Culture in the 1960s and 1980s proposes a new way to understand the outsized afterlife of the bunkered decades. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/cold-war-space-and-culture-in-the-1960s-and-1980s-9780192846167?cc=us&lang=en&. Available on Oxford Scholarship online if your library subscribes; excerpted in PopMatters, Bright Lights Film Journal, and Literary Hub (see attached links).

1980s Pop Music and the Atomic Pleasure Dome

PopMatters: https://www.popmatters.com/1980s-pop-culture-nuclear-war, 2021

Haunted Mountains, Supershelters and the Afterlives of Cold War Infrastructure

Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture , 2019

A dominant architectural form in the global North since the end of the Second World War, the deep... more A dominant architectural form in the global North since the end of the
Second World War, the deep-level supershelters, command centers, and
hidden fortifications built within mountains mobilize an ambivalent
imaginary called here the ‘bunker fantasy’. This cluster of images is
simultaneously technologized and sacred. During the Cold War, imagined mountain bunkers in nuclear war fiction are shown to be haunted by what they exclude. After the Cold War, repurposed mountain-side bunkers and installations invoke new forms of the sacred as part of their reckoning with the past. Because the nuclear condition works against a progressive sense of history, it permits previously discredited or marginalized beliefs to begin recirculating in a new context. Through sacred mountains like Mount Shasta, the apocalyptic prospect of nuclear war becomes just one element within a cosmic and cyclical history that imagines alternate possibilities for the twentieth century.

Bunker Fantasies, Post-Apocalyptic Culture, and an Expanding Subterra

Wayne Barrar is a photographer who is interested in how people use and manipulate underground spa... more Wayne Barrar is a photographer who is interested in how people use and manipulate underground space. His book, “An Expanding Subterra,” depicts hidden underground worksites of mines, power stations, universities, storage facilities, and offices, as well as the surreal domestic world of the subterranean homes in Coober Pedy, an opal mining town in South Australia. He shares 71 of his photos, many of which show surprisingly elaborate underground homes and other structures.

Dr. David Pike presents his findings on his project, “The Bunker Fantasy.” He explains that the project is based on two basic questions: 1) What happens to built underground environments meant to be indestructible when they become obsolete? and 2) What is so compelling about these spaces – why do we build them when they usually prove to be totally useless and why do we keep visiting them after the fact?

Cold War Reduction: The Principle of the Swiss Bunker Fantasy

The bunkerization of Europe is a Cold War story that has continued to resonate into the 21st cent... more The bunkerization of Europe is a Cold War story that has continued to resonate into the 21st century through foreign policy, the built environment, and cultural traces both material and imaginary. This essay explores the physical, ideological, and cultural bunkerization of Switzerland, one of the most heavily fortified countries in the world, through its military and civil defense history, the spatial manifestations of that history, and the cultural responses to these manifestations during and after the Cold War. The essay compares the unusually democratic process of the Swiss civil defense infrastructure and its ramifications for thinking about the spatial legacy of the Cold War with the bunker fantasy in the United States and the rest of Europe. Early on in my research on bunkers and Cold War infrastructure, as I was taking the photo of an entrance to one of the defense networks beneath the Swiss Alps (which is not reproduced here, for reasons that will become clear), an official-looking man drove up and told me that I was breaking the law. It was illegal to take a picture, he said; it was even illegal to take an unauthorized look at this threshold, despite its being in plain view on public land. This came as particularly frustrating news to me, as I had spent the better part of a morning hiking mountain trails in search of just such a look. Earlier, believing I had finally made some progress in my quest, I had happened to chance on a convoy of trucks halted at a security barrier at the edge of the mountain-side woods. Politely but firmly turned away by heavily armed soldiers, I had accepted a truck driver's offer of a ride back down into the riverside town where I had first disembarked from the Swiss Rail train. It was when he had dropped me on the outskirts of the town that I found myself looking through a high wrought-iron gate straight into the heart of the same mountain I had earlier climbed, into a tunnel easily wide enough to accommodate trucks and armored vehicles like those I had encountered much farther up. But here is the twist; the accusing driver who would find me there snapping away with my camera, rather than arrest me in good old Cold War fashion and confiscate my film (or flash drive as the case was here), invited me back to his home, introduced me to his family, offered me lunch, and plied me with pamphlets and books describing

“Tortoises, Oranges, and Giant Tunnels: Bunkers, Albania,” “Defence of the Nation: National Redoubt, Switzerland,” “Defensible Spaces: The Underground Cities of Kinmen and Matsu”

Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within

Three short essays in the volume, Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within. Ed. Paul Dobraszc... more

Wall and Tunnel: The Spatial Metaphorics of Cold War Berlin

Like all of the great modernist cities of Europe, Berlin had a venerable and highly developed und... more Like all of the great modernist cities of Europe, Berlin had a venerable and highly developed underground infrastructure: sewers, service tunnels, sub-. ways. But unlike the Paris sewers, the London Tube, or the Roman catacombs, the German capital was not identified in any mythic or symbolic way with this infrastructure. Rather than based in a physical feature of its subterranean space, the reigning image of subterranean Berlin was metaphorical: the underworld of decadent Weimar culture, a subversive image reinforced during the 1920s ~y the political identity das rote Berlin (red Berlin). There are material grounds for this difference in underground identity, but in this essay I focus on the Wall that gave the city a metaphorics of space symbolizing the global divisions it embodied in a brutally physical manner and the tunnels that, in their very invisibility, were seen both to echo and to subvert that division. After a brief di~cussion of the forerunners to this spatial coupling in the spy tunnels under Vienna and Berlin in the immediate postwar period, I survey the use of tunnels as escape routes after the constructiondf the Wall in 1961 through their depiction in fiction, memoirs, history, and film. I pay particular attention to cinema, for the depiction of the tunnels between Robert Siodmak's 1962 Germano-Hollywood thriller Escape from East Berlin and Roland Suso Richter's epic 2001 TV drama Der Tunnel delineates both the unvarying contours of the metaphorics of Wall and tunnel and the changing uses to which those metaphorics have been put.

The Bunkerization of Albania

Underworld and the Architecture of Urban Space

Bright Lights Film Journal :: John Hillcoat's The Road

s The Road "Hillcoat and his crew have taken the book's hints and modeled their scavenging pair o... more s The Road "Hillcoat and his crew have taken the book's hints and modeled their scavenging pair on contemporary images of homeless people, who already, as Hillcoat aptly puts it, are 'living that apocalyptic world of day-to-day survival on the streets with no money and no food.'" Perhaps unsurprisingly, the signature moment of The Road is not in the book.

Bright Lights Film Journal :: A Boy and His Dog

A Portrait of the Artist in Black and White: Euzhan Palcy’s Rue Cases-Nègres (1983) and François Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups (1959)

Bright Lights Film Journal, 2021

Bacurau: Sheltering in Place

Bright Lights Film Journal, 2020

Review essay on the Brazilian film directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles.

Pike Rev. of Vice, Crime, And Poverty How The Western Imagination Invented The Underworld (2019)

Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Book Reviews , 2020

Of Parasites and Their Hosts: Bong Joon-ho’s Gisaengchung (2019)

Bright Lights Film Journal, 2019

Review essay on the movie Parasite (dir. Bong Joon-ho)

China Miéville’s Fantastic Slums and the Urban Abcanny

Science Fiction Studies, 2019

With few exceptions, China Miéville's oeuvre is built out of urban imaginaries. Miéville's cities... more With few exceptions, China Miéville's oeuvre is built out of urban imaginaries. Miéville's cities are dynamic and dialectically conceived spaces; their key element, where most of the action takes place and most of the energy is invested, is the slum in all its variations, generating and providing the primary setting for the weird horror at the heart of Miéville's imagination, for the attenuated but omnipresent utopianism both obscured and enabled by that horror, and for the space for thinking them through together. Steampunk and the New Weird have incorporated the city into post-genre fantasy in new ways. In particular, they propose an alternate genealogy of the urban fantastic in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century modernism that both repudiates the slum as a space of recidivism and resistance and locates alternate possibilities within its alien confines. What Miéville and other contemporary writers recognize as newly available to us from the nineteenth century is not only the slum's vast image-storehouse of suffering and horror, but also its radically new epistemology. Miéville's New Weird has found a way to locate and spatialize not only the uncanny, but also the repressed abcanny, the known and knowable truths of capitalism, now so familiar to us that they circulate everywhere in the culture industry as dystopia and postapocalypse. The abcanny is that which is not, and never was, and never can be part of our imaginary or imagined by us.

Future Slums: Problems of Urban Space in Science Fiction Cinema

The Apollonian, 2018

Filmmakers have long used the slum setting to frame visually struggles over urban space. Slums ar... more Filmmakers have long used the slum setting to frame visually struggles over urban space. Slums are where cinema and urban imaginaries more generally have long located and visualized whatever does not fit within social norms and middle-class society. This article studies the emergence of the slum as a setting within a specific film genre—science fiction—where it plays a significant if not frequently remarked function, from the late 1960s until the present day. The first section treats science fictional slums from the late ’60s through the end of the Cold War. Here, the dominant tropes of urban representation include: the underground and underground space in both their physical and their cultural senses; new forms of sociality available to (or forced upon) the first generation to grow up within the nuclear condition; and the transformative effects of corrupt authority within urban space. The second section treats science fictional slums after 9/11, where the slum remains associated with various undergrounds, but this time migratory, environmental, and digital in form. The slum occupies an urban borderland, no longer physically central but instead figuring the fraught and permeable periphery of fortified urbanity.

The Apollonian 5, special issue on “The City Plays Itself” (2018): 51-69.

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The slum can remind us of the way periphery and center are mutually constituting forces, and its ... more The slum can remind us of the way periphery and center are mutually constituting forces, and its absence from modernism per se can remind us of the literal absence of that relationship from modernism. The further we move from the traditional centers of modernism, however, the more we find other ways of thinking about the slum.

World Streets and Viae Ferae: The Nineteenth-Century Cityscape in Space and Time

Switched-On Modernism

Steampunk on Film: Inventing the Present

Link to video of a 2017 lecture at CSU-Chico.

Steampunk and the Victorian City: Time Machines, Bryan Talbot, and the Center of the Multiverse

Buried Pleasure: Doctor Dolittle, Walter Benjamin, and the Nineteenth-Century Child

Afterimages of the Victorian City

Headlong into Futurity

Fun in Victorian London Today

Rev. of Alison Byerly, Are We There Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P)

City Settings: American Urban Mysteries from Film Noir to Steampunk / Cadres urbains: Les mystères américains, du film noir au steampunk

American Mysterymania, 2017

Hiding in Plain Sight: Cinematic Undergrounds

The Cinematic Sewer

Urban Nightmares and Future Visions: Life beneath New York

At the conclusion of the first installment of the Planet of the Apes series (1967), Taylor (Charl... more At the conclusion of the first installment of the Planet of the Apes series (1967), Taylor (Charlton Heston), the astronaut turned escaped slave, achieves insight into the hinge of the premise of the five-part science-fiction epic through a glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, half buried in the desert, torch protruding from the sand at a dangerously oblique angle: he has journeyed through time rather than through space, and the planet of the apes is nothing else than the post-apocalyptic future of his own world. This vision of the Statue of Liberty looks more like a visual metaphor than the thing itself fallen off its island perch in New York Bay, however, the enduring cliché of everything Taylor has seen destroyed for him in this future, the blasted myths of America. It is not until midway through the second installment, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), that the metaphor is made concrete, uncategorically asserting that where Taylor is, New York City once was. Penetrating the surface of the planet through a series of caves in search of an explanation for how his world came to be ruled by apes, Taylor's successor, Brent (James Franciscus) stumbles upon a second relic, this time unmistakably the thing itself: a ruined platform, much of its signature tiling still intact, of the Queensboro Plaza station of the New York subway. Following the path of the subway tunnel in imitation of the erstwhile commuter, Brent journeys deeper underground, eventually discovering a tribe

Quatermass in Space

London on Film and Underground

The London Journal, 2013

This paper argues that the symbolic meaning of the London Underground, more than those of other m... more This paper argues that the symbolic meaning of the London Underground, more than those of other metropolitan subway systems, perfectly matches the primary meaning that subways possess as a cultural, and, especially, a cinematic space. In general, different subterranean spaces carry associations with different aspects of the complex attributes of the underground. The subway embodies its quotidian qualities; it is associated with work, daily routine, and the average citizen. This paper studies ways in which the Underground as cinematic setting negotiates the material and cultural attributes of the space, beginning with the intersection of modernity, technology and everyday life in films of the 1920s and 1930s. It then addresses conflicts within this model that emerge in science fiction, horror and fantasy of the 1960s and 1970s. The paper concludes by considering the relationship of the underground railway with the other urban subterranean space primarily featured in film, the sewer, and hypothesizes that the recent appearance, basically for the first time, of the London sewers on screen marks a shift in the cultural identity of underground space within the city.

Hitchcock's Underground

‘Kaliko-Welt’: The Großstädte of Lang’s Metropolis and Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper

More Than Just Another Day Underground Anthony Asquiths First Feature Gets the Deluxe Treatment BLFJ

Canadian Cinema since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World

Critical history of recent Canadian cinema.

The Enigma of Arrival: Time-Traveling from Lovecraft to La Jetée

Canadian Cinema in the Age of Globalization

Thoroughly Modern Maddin

The Passing of Celluloid, the Endurance of the Image: Egoyan, ‘Steenbeckett’ and Krapp’s Last Tape

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Across the Great Divide

Burning the Candle at Both Ends: Denis Villeneuve's Incendies (2010)

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Atom Egoyan's Adoration

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Atom Egoyan's Chloe

Bright Lights Film Journal :: Four Films in Search of an Author: Atom Egoyan

Bright Lights Film Journal :: The Future of a Delusion: On David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method (2011

Dante and the Medieval City: How the Dead Live

The Oxford Handbook of Chaucer, 2020

This chapter explores the paradox that the most sustained and influential literary representation... more This chapter explores the paradox that the most sustained and influential literary representation of the medieval city is set in the afterlife. The chapter begins with a discussion of Dante’s reproduction of the vertical Christian cosmos within the horizontality of everyday life in the city. It then looks at the place of hell within this city, the types of urban experience represented within it, and its relationship to the heavenly city as which Dante figures paradise. The final section of the essay surveys the dissemination of this urban model into the diverse cityscapes of Boccaccio, Chaucer, François Villon, and Christine de Pizan. The chapter concludes that late medieval urban representations are characterized by the growing insistence on the city as a site of representational difference and local autonomy that remains nevertheless deeply embedded in the spatial dynamics of verticality

Passage through Hell: Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds

Chapters on Classical & Medieval Descents; Louis–Ferdinand Céline; Peter Weiss, Dante; Christine ... more

The Devil Comes to Town - Medieval Devils and Urban Modernity.pdf

This is a talk I gave back in 2004. The parts on Paris and London were reworked and published in ... more This is a talk I gave back in 2004. The parts on Paris and London were reworked and published in my book, Metropolis on the Styx. One day, I hope to incorporate the rest of the medieval content into a project on the Devil. Until that time, this is as much as I have written on it. Sadly, I seem to have misplaced the image file.

On Hell: Dan Schneider Video Interview with Chris Date, David Pike, and Alan Bernstein

by David Pike, Alan E Bernstein, and Christopher M Date

Bernard Silvestris' Descent into the Classics: the Commentum super sex libros Aeneidos

What did it mean to be a Christian teacher of pagan literature in 12th-century Europe?

‘Le dreit enfer vus mosterruns’: Marie de France’s Espurgatoire Seint Patriz

Bad Infinities: Some Peculiarities of Borges' Fiction

Without a special archangel to keep track, what does it mean that we are going through the thirte... more Without a special archangel to keep track, what does it mean that we are going through the thirteen thousand five hundred and fourteenth cycle and not the first in the series or number three hundred twenty-two to the two thousandth power? Nothing, in practice-which is no impairment to the thinker. Nothing, for the intellect-which is serious indeed. ("The Doctrine of Cycles," 1936) I want to begin with an apparently irrelevant personal history. As far as I can remember, although I knew the cover of Labyrinths from my parents' bookshelf, I first encountered Borges as a reader when the text of "Borges and I" was the sum total of the final exam for an undergraduate class on "Hermeneutics" with the sociologist Braulio Muñoz. My first professional conference paper, as a grad student, was on Borges (1990, University of Louisville). I lost the original paper, adapted from a longer essay written for a seminar on prefaces with Dominique Jullien; so, my goal for this talk was to write that paper again. As might be expected, it turned out very differently.

Willesden to Cricklewood: NW London inWhite Teeth

Corruption Plots

Bernard Silvestris’ descent into the classics: TheCommentum super sex libros Aeneidos

International Journal of the Classical Tradition, 1998

What did it mean to be a Christian teacher of pagan literature in 12th-century Europe? Bernard Si... more What did it mean to be a Christian teacher of pagan literature in 12th-century Europe? Bernard Silvestris addresses this question in the margins of his allegorical Commentary on the First Six Books of the Aeneid. In the manifest reading of what he calls the integumentura of the Aeneid, Bernard tells the journey of the soul from its imprisonment in the body to its return to God, with its education in the trivium and quadrivium beginning with the descensus ad inferos of book 6. At the same time, however, Bernard also introduces a narrative allegory of teaching. The commentary's teacher is shown to labor under both the inability to accede to the authority of the inspired Christian exegete and the unwillingness to forego the concomitant access to prophetic truth. Sed nos, quos crassa Minerva dedecet, non patiamur abstrusa esse adyta sacri poematis, sed, arcanorum sensuum investigato aditu, doctorum cultu celebranda praebeamus reclusa penetralia.-Macrob ius, Saturnalia (1.24.13) But we, w h o feel conscious of a finer taste, will not suffer the entrance to the sacred p o e m to r e m a i n h i d d e n a w a y a n y longer, but we will e x a m i n e the road that leads to its most secret recesses and throw o p e n its i n m o s t shrine for the veneration of scholars.

Corruption Plots

Cornell University Press eBooks, Mar 23, 2023

Urban Nightmares and Future Visions: Life Beneath New York

Wide Angle, 1998