The City and the Writer: New York City

Catalog description

The City and the Writer: New York City is a laboratory for studying New York City, works written about it, as well as creating new works inspired by it. New works—poems, short stories, short plays or films—that will serve as a map for possible journeys as they reinvent and talk back to centuries of debates on immigration and space, culture and literature. A cross-disciplinary and cross-border conversation that examines how urban life and the cityscape create imaginative spaces, and the way words create cities. NYC as a global space will be explored in the works of American writers with backgrounds from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Latin America, and the Caribbean. How does the city shape the form of writing and language? How has literature challenged certain theories on space, and narratives constructed around urban identities? We will explore different neighborhoods and their histories and meet different inventors. Students get the unique opportunity to meet numerous residents, from theater makers, designers, architects, artists, filmmakers, feminists, actors, comedians, chefs and bodega owners. Discussions will revolve around private and public spaces, ruins and constructions, traditions and modernity, memory and hyphenated identities, literature and society. The class will integrate film, photography, painting among other medias, to enrich the visual study of NYC. The city is the stage that will inspire the students’ new works. Every block in NYC is a different film set; this class offers students the opportunity to be part of the magic and to create their own story here.