Writing the City

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

How do writers talk about the city, and why do they talk about it in the ways that they do? This course will survey the global history of urban literature from the late nineteenth century to the present, supplementing that history with insights and conceptual tools drawn from urbanism, human geography, philosophy, and cultural studies. We will examine the effects of industrialization, imperialism, world wars, decolonization, deindustrialization, neocolonialism, secular stagnation, and climate change on the shape and experience of urban life as it is recorded by writers around the world – be they realists, naturalists, modernists, postmodernists, or pulp writers. We will follow in parallel the development of urban life and the development of urban literatures over the course of the twentieth century, familiarizing ourselves with the material history of the city, the literary history of city writing, and the intellectual history of theorists of space. Likely authors include: Charles Baudelaire, Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Sam Selvon, Chinua Achebe, Georges Perec, James Baldwin, Eileen Chang, Zoe Wicomb, Xi Xi, Phaswane Mpe, Dorothy Tse.