Reading Literature: Literature and the City

Today, more than half of the world's people live in cities and that proportion is expected to increase to 70% by 2050. As centers of goods, information, capital, culture, and political power, cities have been crucial to our understanding of modernity. The city is not only a built settlement in a specific place with particular forms of social interaction and power, it is equally to be understood as the symbolic life of that place. The city is constituted by and experienced as the images, sensations, emotions, and memories that it conveys. We will focus on representations of the city and city life in selected poems, short stories, plays and novels. For some of the literary and cultural contexts in which to interpret representations of urban experience, we will read essays on the city. We will also examine short pieces on theoretical approaches to the interpretation of literature, and brief accounts of literary terms and of elements of poetry, narrative fiction, and drama. 3 hrs. lect./disc.