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English/American Studies 186

Tales of Three Cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles

Judith Richardson

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Class meetings: TuTh 3:00-4:50, Bldg.240, Room 110

Office hours:t.b.d.

E-mail: ; Office phone: 723-2724

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This course explores the ways in which urban form and experience shape literary texts, and how literary texts participate in the creation of urban place, by looking at the literature of three American cities in paradigmatic moments: New York in the mid-19th century; Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and Los Angeles in the mid- to late 20th century.

The following books are available for purchase at the bookstore. Other readings will be made available via Canvas or as handouts.

  • George G. Foster,New York by Gas-Light; and Other Sketches (U of California Press)
  • Horatio Alger,Ragged Dick.(Signet)
  • Theodore Dreiser,Sister Carrie(Dover Thrift Edition)
  • Upton Sinclair,The Jungle(Dover Thrift Edition)
  • Nathanael West,The Day of the Locust(Signet)
  • Raymond Chandler,The Big Sleep(Vintage)
  • Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992(Anchor)

Schedule

4/4Introduction

4/6Prelude

  • Edgar Allan Poe “The Man of the Crowd” (handout)
  • Peter Brooks, “The Text of the City” (handout)
  • Raymond Williams, “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism” (handout)

New York

4/11Letters from New York

  • Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York, selections (handout)
  • Hans Bergmann, God in the Street, parts of chaps. 1 and 2 (on Canvas)
  • David Henkin, City Reading, Chap. 2 (on Canvas)

4/13The Inside Dope

  • George Foster, New York by Gaslight, and Other Urban Sketches, selected sketches

4/18Singing the Body Urban

  • Walt Whitman, selected poems and prose (handout)

4/20Working Up

  • Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick
  • Henkin, City Reading, parts of chaps. 3 and 6 (Canvas)

4/25Preferring Not To

  • Herman Melville, “Bartleby” (handout)

Chicago

4/27The Build-Up

  • Henry Claridge, “Chicago: ‘The Classical Center of American Materialism” (Canvas)
  • Donald Miller, chapter from City of the Century (Canvas)
  • Louis Sullivan, selected writings (handout)

5/2Making a Chicago Idiom/Aesthetic

  • H. L. Mencken, “The Literary Capital of the United States”(handout)
  • Carl Sandburg, selections from Chicago Poems (handout)

5/4-5/9The Girl Comes to the Big City

  • Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie

5/11-5/16 How the Other Half Lives

  • Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

Los Angeles

5/18-23 Dreamland

  • David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles, chap. 1 (Canvas)
  • Reyner Banham, chapter 6 of The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Canvas)
  • Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust

5/25-30The Naked City

  • Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
  • Robert Towne, Roman Polanski, Chinatown (screening date and time TBA)

6/1-6 Walls and Mosaics

  • Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992
  • Thomas Pynchon, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” (Canvas)

Requirements:

  • Midterm essay, 5-6 pages (30%)
  • Final essay, 8-10 pages (40%)
  • Attendance and active participation in class discussions (30%, includes focus points)
  • Focus points: By 11 p.m. on the evening before each class (thus Monday and Wednesday evenings), please e-mail me a brief comment or question of no more 150 words regarding some passage or aspect of the reading you would like to discuss in class. These comments will not be formally graded, but will be part of your participation grade.

Learning Outcomes

Students should be able to:

-Recognize how American cities took shape within particular social, economic, and technological contexts, and understand how the rise of particular cities both reflected and affected historical and cultural changes;

-To trace how the form as well as the conceptualization of “the city” in American culture differs and develops over geographical space and historical time;

-Recognize how representational and aesthetic innovations—new genres, techniques, and themes—developed in response to particular urban experiences and challenges;

-Understand the dynamic roles that various kinds of texts played in mapping or constructing urban space and society;

-Use literary texts to explore social issues within urban settings, including issues of issues of race, class, ethnicity, and gender;

-Put literary and historical documents into conversation, to understand both the social work done by literary texts and the literary nature of historical or journalistic accounts.