New Urban Fiction

Catalog description

Many literary theorists show that the novel has always been the literary form of urban life. It came to prominence wherever cities grew in the eighteenth century. As we come to the nineteenth century, certain cities take on a literary character. Some are even treated to a literary version, often attached to the name of an author: Balzac’s Paris, Dickens’ London, Dostoevsky’s Saint Petersburg. In the twentieth century, New York joins the club and overtakes imperial metropolitan areas, to the extent that even boroughs have authors’ names attached to them: Edit Wharton’s Manhattan, James Baldwin’s Harlem, Paul Auster’s Brooklyn.As we enter the new century, new contestants have emerged. The literary cities are no longer exclusive to Europe and North America. Around the world, many countries shrugged off their colonial past in the last century, established their own literary voice, their particular literary rendition of their cities. Within half a century a great amount of fiction written in metropolitan areas of non-Western cultures appeared. Now we can confidently talk about Salman Rushdie’s Bombay, Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo, Vargas Llosa’s Lima.This course is an overview of this evolution, with focus on new literary metropolis. We will start off discussing theories pertinent to city and the novel. Those theories will give us the analytical toolbox we need for talking about the stories. I select six cities (Lima, Istanbul, Cairo, Calcutta, Kiev, Beirut), and will assign six novels written by authors (Mario Vargas Llosa, Orhan Pamuk, Naguib Mahfouz, Amitav Ghosh, Andrey Kurkov, Rabih Alameddine) whose names have come to represent those cities. We discuss these books within the context of the new urban fiction.