In "The Metaphoric and Metonymic Poles," Roman Jakobson notes two types of aphasia, one to do with the inability to substitute, the other to combine -- in other words an incapacity with relation to similarities (metaphor)  or with contiguity (metonymy). 

"The development of a discourse my take place along two different semantic lines: one       topic may lead to another either through their similarity or through their contiguity. The

metaphoric way would be the most appropriate term for the first case and the metonymic way for the second, since they find their most condensed expression  in metaphor and metonymy respectively" (42)

He argues that milder forms of this aphasia can be detected in the verbal arts and that the uneven exercise of one pole can lead to the deterioration of the other (for which he cites an example of a Russian author prone to metaphor who, in his old age, exhibited traits of a similarity disorder - he split the idea of his self into his first and last names, unable to unite the two names, first and patronymic into a unified figure. An analysis of his writings reveals a tendency towards metonymy and synecdoche).  

Asking why there has not been more study of the two poles, Jakobson concludes that in metalinguistic practice "the researcher possesses more homogenous means to handle metaphor, whereas metonymy , based on a different principle, easily defies interpretation... Not only the tool of the observer but also the object of observation is responsible for the preponderance of metaphor over metonymy in scholarship." Thus he determines that literary study suffers from a contiguity disorder. 

Martin Rubin's Thrillers may deserve a reconsideration. In his section "Supercops" (137) he notes that an influx of police thrillers in the 70s may be due to law and order issues being foregrounded in 1968 and 1972 political campaigns and to "a general (though transitional and deeply conflicted) swing to the right in American politics. "Transitional and conflicted" is interesting to me here. Is there a sense in which the fear of city deployed in these films is politically ambiguous? Also, police films of this period seem to be where social issues of the day get there most nuanced and for the most part, liberal working through.  

- Meetings about the dissertation proposal last week were encouraging and fruitful, though I got contradictory responses to my use of Kracauer's Theory of Film as a critical framework. One advisor thought it worked, the other didn't. Both agreed, however, that I need to more explicitly broach the issue of race, which I am working on now. One advisor also suggested that ideas of realism might be hindering to me. He suggested instead that I look to Jakobson's "Metaphor and Metonymy" and a way of understanding disparate aesthetic impulses involved in constructing/imagining worlds. Metaphor having more to do with a classically Romantic impulse, and metonymy having to do with the idea of contiguity, which in my project would parallel the idea I have about the story of urban mystery as a "stretching out" across the city, connecting disparate spaces. Still have to read Jakobson to figure out how this might work.

- These past few days, in an effort to get back to "first principles," as well as to possibly understand the historical "philosophy" and parameters of my project, I have been reading Susan Buck-Morss' The Dialectics of Seeing. Not sure exactly if Benjamin or the idea of dialectical images will be helpful to me for understanding the the imagery of the city in the the 1970s, but it's good to read nonetheless. 

-Interesting quote from a Martin Scorsese interview in Scenes from the City (a photographic book about filmmaking in NYC) wherein (to paraphrase) the interviewer (James Sanders) and Scorsese talk about the difference between his and Woody Allen's films. Scorsese says they're fascinating to him precisely because they reference an intellectual milieu that is totally alien to him (he grows up in a house with no books, no New Yorker magazine) and that it's kind of funny that Allen's films never involve experiences of urban danger or violence - his New York is safe. Possibly good quotes for entering into a discussion on how Allen's films involve anticipating NY gentrification (a point Sanders makes in Celluloid Skyline).  If so, what do Scorese's films represent the anticipation of? Or do they concern forms of urban experience no longer relevant?