This paper discusses professor and author Richard Sennett's views and book "The Fall of Public Man", along with the writings of scholars, authors and critics associated with urban-themed literature.
Abstract This paper explains that Richard Sennett's observations of people in the 18th Century, which he considers the Gold Age of urban life, are that people reflective all economic levels of society, lived their lives in almost continuous performance and paraded themselves about publicly in wildly expressive costumes. The author points out that there are powerful similarities between Sennett's themes of real time play-acting drama, in which 18th Century Parisians are viewed as characters in an ongoing interactive theatrical environment, and Levi-Strauss' anthropological narrative as he leaves the Calcutta Hotel and becomes "the center of a ballet". The paper concludes that, if Sennett were to describe the frustration urban Americans experience in bumper-to-bumper rush-hour traffic, he would likely allude to narcissism.
From the Paper "Sennett's book "The Fall of Public Man", which, in brief summary, is an attempt to create and justify a theory that has to do with how people, social relations, and the drama of intimacy are going through - and have gone through - dramatic changes in American urban society. His theory, Sennett explains, is one that attempts to explain the "confusion" that has "arisen between public and intimate life." Masses of people are concerned with "their single life histories and particular emotions as never before," he writes; but in the process of people being concerned they are falling into a "trap" rather than being "liberated."
