The City in Literature

Catalog description

Students in the course will learn to identify, interpret, analyze, and evaluate the literary imagination of the city in its individual, social and cultural dimensions. What forms or genres, narrative strategies, and tropes and motifs do literary texts employ to represent the history, geography, and sensorial experience of the city? How do literary texts understand the fraught relationships between the city, nation, region and the world? The course will examine not only the representations of the city in literature but also how these literary texts might inform our own experience of urban places. Students will use research and scholarly writing to challenge simplistic narratives of urban capitalist transformation or urban decay and instead produce new knowledge that synthesizes the many contradictions that the city represents: between freedom and alienation, anonymity and entangled lives, feelings of strangeness and fleeting intimacies. Literature will provide us a unique vantage point for understanding the messy and complex realities of race, gender, class and sexuality in the city in a way that cannot be grasped through the big data approaches to the urban sphere. Meets Magis Core Literature component. P: Critical Issues in Human Inquiry course.