Hugh Hood's Around the Mountain is a response to a specific sociohistorical circumstance: the development of a new and boundless urbanism, one which escapes the power of vision through its very dispersal. Emphasizing the palimpsestic nature of urban space, Hood uses a number of strategies to draw the reader's attention to alternative spatial practices. The representation of the city as a process is emphasized by the text's attention in a number of stories at the margins of urban expansion. By making visible the process that produces and reproduces the urban, the text works to make the city comprehensible to its inhabitants, and to "disalienate" them.
