"Occupying Space in American Literature and Culture inscribes itself within the spatial turn that permeates the ways we look at literary and cultural productions. The volume seeks to clarify
the connections between race, space, class, and identity as it concentrates on different occupations and disoccupations, enclosures and boundaries. Space is scaled up and down, from the body,
the ground zero of spatiality, to the texturology of Manhattan; from the striated place of the office in Melville's "Bartleby the Scrivener" on Wall Street, to the striated spaces of internment
camps and reservations; from the lowest of the low, the (human) clutter that lined the streets of Albany, NY during the Depression, to the new Towers of Babel that punctuate the contemporary
architecture of transparencies. As it strings together these spatial narratives, the volume reveals how, beyond the boundaries that characterize each space, every location has loose ends that
are impossible to contain"--
