Ethan Goldberg is a PhD Candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center. His dissertation is an examination of literary and filmic representations of the post-1945 city, with a particular focus on affect, or how cities make people feel, and how they navigate them. It is organized in four sections—”Alienation”; “Disappearance”; “Eroticism”; and “The Random Encounter and the Possibility of Community”—each of which includes an autotheoretical account of the theme and an essay diptych on a novel and a film. Beginning with works that demonstrate some of the more negative dynamics and affects inherent to post-war cities (e.g. Sam Selvon’sTheLonely Londoners[1956]), the project concludes by considering potentially liberating representations of the city (e.g. John Wilson’sHow To with John Wilson[2020—]). Its ultimate mission is to both contribute to the field of knowledge on the city—real and imagined—as well as to serve a disalienating function for the reader.