Reading the City (First-Year Seminar)

Catalog description

This first-year seminar will consider how nineteenth-century literature helped transform the city into the symbolic nerve center of modern social life, and it will follow the changing shapes of urbanism across contexts and into the present. To make sense of these conflicting meanings, we will examine what versions of the city take shape in fiction, poetry, social theory, photography, film, and contemporary writing and media. See the English Department's website at www.english.upenn.edu for a description of the current offerings.