Before you begin: here is some useful (but absolutely NOT required) background reading:
Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (1995)
This course, taught by a New York native, will explore the writings of those who have tried to define one of the largest and most diverse cities in the world. Known for offering anonymity and inflicting isolation, New York was the epicenter of the Gilded age, the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance, various waves of feminism, and a variety of intellectual and political movements. Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, E.B. White, Betty Smith, Elizabeth Bishop and Irwin Shaw are among the writers whom we will read. What is unique about "the city," as natives say, will be explored, for instance E.B. White's praise of New York as a place offering "the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy." Poems, short stories, fiction, including children’s books, and essays will be covered. Much of the reading is available online, but students should purchase the following:
The Portable Dorothy Parker (Penguin Classics, 2006)
Betty Smith, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 1943 (HarperPerennial, 2001)
Elizabeth Enright, The Saturdays, (1941.
E.L. Konigsburg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil. E. Frankweiler (1972)
- Lehrende(r): Florian Deckers
- Lehrende(r): Melissa Knox-Raab