‘I Tried to Work Out Where I Was’: Contemporary Suburbia

Abstract

In this book I have been arguing that the suburb presents a key semiotic problem of modernity and that this is presented in various forms in suburban fiction. Such fiction asks questions of how we live. More precisely what we can see, know and communicate of our lived environments, especially the new urban and suburban sectors of the rapidly expanding modern metropolis. Suburban fiction repeatedly explores what the truth might be, the substantive objective reality, of the suburb. One key manifestation of the problem with uncovering the reality of the suburb, one we have seen reoccurring over and over in suburban fiction, is a problematic suburban materiality. Suburban investigation, as we have seen, encounters a range of problematic material conditions: