The City in American Arts and Popular Culture

3 units

FOR STUDENTS AT MECC ONLY. This course will explore the range of responses to the 20th century city in the arts, film, photography, comics, vaudeville, literary, and sociological texts, from the late 19th century to World War II. Artists, writers, sociologists, and cultural commentators in the U.S. have identified the city as the primary locus of a vast array of historical transformations associated with modernization: new industrial forms of labor; immigration and the assimilation of new cultures; democratizing forces; technological change; popular and mass media. Older hierarchies were upended, along with a sense of stable communal networks, folk traditions, and village patterns based in the Southern and Eastern European cultures from which the new immigrants of the early 20th century had come. Cities were also the testing ground for new expressions of gender and sexual freedom, ethnic, racial, and class identities. The city was an incubator of difference, forming new and fluid networks that catalyzed creative expression, a vibrant popular culture, and urban subjects equipped with new tools for navigating a world of strangers. But the city was also associated with social alienation, standardization, and commercial 'kitsch.' We will consider its exciting new possibilities, but also the fears and anxieties the new urban environment triggered.