Topic
Site-specific Literature in Urban Context: A Comparative European Perspective
My talk explores twenty-first-century site-specific literature in a comparative European perspective. “Site-specific literature” is used here to refer to oral or written texts that are situated within a specific location and that derive at least some of their meanings from the material and cultural frameworks of that location. The term includes the kinds of literary signage that is more commonly bracketed under urban heritage, literary tourism or cultural marketing. But it also, and more poignantly, includes interactive and collaborative works such as literary texts that are (co-)produced in public space by official city poets; site-specific theatre performances; and the interaction between narrated dialogue and city walkers in the case of audiowalks or ambient literature (Abba et al.). The starting point of my talk will be examples from urban public space in cities in Belgium (Antwerp), the Netherlands (Rotterdam), and Finland (Helsinki). The aim is to set out a framework for a comparative approach to the narrative forms and civic functions of site-specific literature.
In the first part, my focus will be on the narrative forms of site-specific literature, with a particular attentiveness to direct address (apostrophe, with an address to the “you” of the passer-by); dialogue (within and across texts); polyphony (especially the real or imagined inclusion of different voices), and what is called here (drawing on graphic novel theory; see Groensteen et al.) “spatial braiding”, the rhyming effect of spatial elements in the text and in the related urban site. The second part will consider the civic roles of these forms of site-specific literature, and will focus on how the selected literary corpus brings together different voices in the context of fragmented public spheres in contemporary European cities.
This paper draws on existing work in literary urban studies (Ameel), new formalisms in literary studies (Levine), as well as on recent approaches to civic and public roles of poetry (see; Finberg; Fuchs).
Lieven Ameel (University of Helsinki, ALUS)
Lieven Ameel is professor of literary studies at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He has worked extensively on the interaction between urban form and literary form, with recent books including Coastal Cities of the Future in Contemporary Literature (forthcoming, 2026) and the edited volume Routledge Companion to Literary Urban Studies (2022). He is one of the co-founders of the Association for Literary Urban Studies and one of the editors of the Palgrave series in literary urban studies.
Sources
- Ameel: ‘“A Stream of Words” – The Antwerp Quay Poem as Interrogation of Urban Open Form, Polyphony, and Radical Dialogue’ Textual Practice vol. 36, no. 7 (2021), pp. 1175-1194.
- Benthien & Gestring: Public Poetry: Lyrik im urbanen Raum. (DeGruyter, 2023).
- Finberg: Poetry in General: How a Literary Form Became Public (Columbia UP, 2025)
- Fuchs: Civic Storytelling: The Rise of Short Forms and the Agency of Literature (Zone Books, 2023.)
- Groensteen: The System of Comics (UP of Mississippi, 2007).
- Levine: Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton UP, 2015).
- Abba et al.: Ambient Literature: Towards a New Poetics of Situated Writing and Reading Practices (Palgrave, 2021).