New York Stories

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

New York City is the cultural capital of twentieth- (and, thus far), twenty-first century America— the center of literature, music, art, architecture, and fashion as well as the focal point for political debates on the viability of cities, immigration, and the meaning of America itself. This course studies autobiographical, fictional, non-fictional, historical, poetic, and cinematic accounts of twentieth-century life in New York City in order to understand the dreams and nightmares embodied by the city in the American imagination. Beginning with historical readings from Russell Shorto’s The Island at the Center of the World and Gotham by Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace and proceeding into the “New York Story” templates of Poe and Whitman, we will investigate the decline of “old guard” aristocratic society in the early 1900s and the nature of the immigrant experience in New York. The course will then focus on the Jazz Age when New York artists, writers, and architects shaped a new ethos of modernity that would define “The American Century.” Attention will also be devoted to New York City during WWII and the golden age that followed through the early 1960s when clashes between followers of Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs debated the future of the city. As this course extends into the 1970s and beyond, we will consider the disparity of wealth that distinguishes New York today, as well as many of the country’s other great cities. The course will conclude with 9/11 and will consider contemporary dystopian and stubbornly utopian predictions about the future of New York City and urban life in America.