Literature and the City

As centers of goods, information, capital, culture, and political power, cities have been crucial to our understanding of modern life. The city is not only a built settlement in a specific place with particular forms of social interaction and power, it is also the symbolic life of that place. The city is constituted by and experienced as the images, sensations, emotions, and memories that it conveys. In a sense, the city is a text that can be read and interpreted. We will focus in this section of ENGL 103 on representations of the city and city life in selected poems, short stories, a play and a novel. We will also examine short pieces on literary-historical movements (romanticism, realism, modernism, postmodernism) and theoretical approaches to the interpretation of literature (including structuralism, poststructuralism, feminism, Marxism, postcolonial theory). To equip students to do close readings of literature, we will acquaint ourselves with literary terms to discuss elements of poetry, drama, and narrative fiction. For some of the literary and cultural contexts in which to interpret representations of urban experience, we will read essays on the city.