Course Overview
This course will explore the city as a literary & visual subject. We will examine representations, myths, and mappings of New York and other cities (London, Paris, Dublin, Venice, Rio) through a range of texts. We will consider the connection between the modern city & literary modernism, looking at the ways in which modernist writers responded to 20th c. urbanism through narrative, rhetorical, thematic and stylistic experiments. We will also focus on the figure of the flaneur in poetry (the urban poet-streetwalker). Narratives & images from the Harlem Renaissance and immigrant turn-of-the-century enclaves in New York will allow us to examine racialized and ethnic spaces, a dialectics of inside/outside, and the street as a site. We will also look at the construction of gendered spaces and queerscapes to explore how gender and sexuality are constitutive of, and are constituted by, urban form and urban life. Other themes include: nationalism, expat identity, crowds versus solitude, the urban spectacle, anonymity, the city as a body and mask. We will integrate various arts, including photography, painting, sculpture, music, fashion, architecture, etc. as we study the city’s literary and artistic images.
