Reading the Global City: Crisis, Cognitive Mapping and the “Urban Sensorium” in Tom McCarthy’s <em>Satin Island</em> and Ben Lerner’s <em>10:04</em>

“What is the role played by aesthetics and politics of space,” asks Kanishka Goonewardena, “in producing reproducing durable disjunction between consciousness our urban everyday life […] now global structure social relations that itself ultimately responsible for spaces lived-experience?” (55). Goonewardena’s account “urban sensorium” describes mediatory, ideological space in this “gap,” informing his adaptation Jameson’s “cognitive mapping” as a hermeneutics experience vis-à-vis totality. This article considers mediation these insights critical aesthetic strategies two city novels written post-2008/11 recessionary period, Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island (2015) Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014). The former thematizes obfuscating function “depthless” late neoliberal era, while latter pursues an immanent cognitive mapping project predicated on interpretation life.