Literature and the Global City

ELIT 378 treats the modern city as both a subject and a problem for literature: writers from Baudelaire to Vladislavic have had to invent new forms to capture metropolitan life because the city's speed, density, and strangeness keep outrunning conventional representation. You'll work through canonical European city-texts alongside writing from non-European megacities, building up a vocabulary from urban studies (the flaneur, the crowd, alienation, gentrification) through quizzes, a midterm, a paper, and a take-home final. It pairs naturally with modernism and literary theory electives, and it's where the department's interest in form meets interdisciplinary criticism on space, modernity, and everyday life.