Literature and the Global City

This course offers a sustained focus on one of the central themes in literature from the 19th century to the present: the city. The modern city occupies a unique space of both fascination and frustration in the literary imagination. As the hub of endlessly complex and novel forms of life, it provides writers with a rich imaginative resource. At the same time, the very complexity of the modern metropolis, and the breakneck speed of its transformations, has often thwarted representation, driving writers to develop new literary techniques and to accommodate themselves to radically unstable modes of experience. In this class, we will examine a number of significant literary engagements with the modern city. The course may take a global perspective, reading a selection of canonical European city-texts by writers such as Baudelaire, Poe, Joyce, and Woolf alongside literary engagements with the emergent megacities of the non-European world, which often challenge normative conceptions of how a city should look and function.