Writing New York, Spring 2008

With registration deadlines approaching, it's time to order books for next semester, which will mark (if I'm counting right) the fifth time Cyrus and I have taught Writing New York together since we first developed the class in 2003.

The course consists of two lively, media-heavy lectures a week and one recitation section in which students discuss the week's reading in smaller groups. We generally take turns delivering the lectures, taking a week or two at a time then trading off with the team-teacher. We begin by dealing primarily with prose fiction, poetry, and drama, but in the twentieth-century portions of the course bring in popular music, film, and graphic novels as well. Yes, this is the course where you get to read Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and listen to the Velvet Underground for college credit. (Of course, you'll walk away able to place them in historical and cultural context along with a lot of other things -- some of them more high-brow.)

Here's how we've described the course for several years running on the syllabus: "This course examines the evolution of New York City as a literary construct as well as the city’s emergence and continual reinvention as one of the country’s ─ and the world’s ─ premier sites of literary and cultural production. Beginning with the earliest New York theaters in the eighteenth century and continuing to the present, we will examine a range of drama, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry to reveal a variety of New York experiences. Students will also learn about the city’s cultural history; note the development of literary forms in American literature from the late eighteenth century to the present; understand how writing about New York contributed to American literary history as we commonly understand it today; think about the relationship between literature and other artistic forms and media; and explore the nature of interdisciplinary work in the humanities."

The syllabus will include works by Royall Tyler, Washington Irving, Herman Melville, Anna Cora Mowatt, Walt Whitman, Horatio Alger, Henry James, Edith Wharton, Abraham Cahan, Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, Lin Yutang, E.L. Doctorow, and Tony Kushner, among others; the films The Jazz Singer,  Manhattan, and Do the Right Thing; and the albums TheVelvet Underground and Nico and Patti Smith's Horses. (Click here to see a PDF version of last year's syllabus.)

We'll also, this time around, be test-driving some early drafts of chapters from our cultural history-in-progress. And we'll be sponsoring an optional Friday-afternoon film series that parallels the syllabus -- to be held in the Broome Street residence hall.

If you happen to be an NYU undergrad and this course suits your needs and interests -- please join us! If that's not something you're able to do, we're happy to have you along as a reader of this site, which will touch on issues we're dealing with in the classroom but by no means will be restricted to that setting.