Cities as Stories
The UPLIFT project investigates how literature across cultures imagines space, especially cities, as both subject and method to interpret history and society. From Tokyo to Madrid, Hebrew to Polish texts, we explore realist, speculative, and dystopian narratives to see cities as repositories, laboratories, and mirrors of memory, imagination, and social change.
Method
The study combines close reading, narratology, cultural theory, and digital mapping to “excavate” the spatial logics of literary texts. Comparative analysis across strands highlights recurring patterns while also revealing divergences foregrounded in specific historical and cultural contexts. Entwining different languages, regions, and media, the project offers a global perspective on how literature conceptualizes (urban) spaces as refracting memory, imagination, and social analysis, providing tools to understand space as a medium for envisioning human experience and possible futures.
Step into the labyrinth
Transpacific speculative fiction and interactive media represent cities as unstable spaces where past and future collide. Narratives turn streets and skylines into experiments in time and imagination.
Tokyo & Modernity
Nineteenth-century Tokyo as a city imagining modernity and identity. Literature shows us how the urban landscape reflects social transformation.
Hebrew & Jewish Urban Imaginaries
From utopias to dystopias, showing urban spaces as sites of political, environmental, and existential anxiety, revealing how cities carry collective hopes and fears.
Madrid as a Living Organism
Madrid is alive in fiction. Contemporary Spanish narratives depict the city as a fluid, changing organism, mirroring social transformations and projecting crises.
Polish urban fantasy meets ecodystopia
Literature shows how culture and nature intersect in cities, offering social and environmental critique through imaginative storytelling.
Mapping imagination
The UPLIFT project combines close reading, cultural theory, and digital mapping to explore how literature conceptualizes space as a tool for understanding human experience and future possibilities.
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Meet the team
The UPLIFT Project team brings together five associate professors from the University of Naples L’Orientale.
Serena Fusco (P.I.)
Andrea F. De Carlo
Raffaele Esposito
Gala M. Follaco
