PWHNY: When I teach The Contrast in an American Lit survey I discuss it as dealing with post-Revolutionary American culture broadly. In Writing New York it’s a more local affair, a picture of New York staged for New Yorkers by a visiting Bostonian. How do you teach the play?

CK: I first read the play in grad school, but never really thought about teaching it (or editing it) until it was one of the assigned texts for a discussion group (among high school teachers) that I was leading for a National Humanities Center Seminar in North Carolina. Although I thought that the play was really, really funny, I had never really thought that its humor would transfer to a discussion group of modern readers. It did. So, the main reason I decided to edit the play was to create an accessible edition for use in college-level courses. What fun to talk about dating and sex and shopping in a college history class! (The only online edition at that point was a real mess and not especially usable.)

I have used the book as a required text in undergraduate and graduate classes on the Revolutionary era and in an undergraduate course in American women’s/gender history. In both contexts, I tend to play up the gender angles. Among other things, this play is very much about the distinctive roles of women and men — at home, in the marketplace, and in society — and how, if at all, those roles differed in a republic. I also emphasize the extent to which, even after the Revolution, the U.S. was part of an Atlantic culture. The question of how distinctive Americans were within that Atlantic world is arguably the central one in Tyler’s play. And the notion of “American exceptionalism” continues to be hotly debated, even in today’s political discourse.

PWHNY: Cold War readings of the play often took for granted that Manly and Maria and Jonathan were unquestionably virtuous and the play’s heroes. Over time I’ve come to think that Tyler satirizes them as forcefully as anyone else. Does the play have characters we’re meant to embrace and emulate?

I agree completely that Tyler satirizes both Manly and Maria. Despite his admirable qualities — patriotism, loyalty, respect for his parents and for women, etc. — Manly is long-winded and wears bad (and old) clothes. Arguably, his patriotism, however inspiring during the war, was not the kind that would make him an effective role model in the post-revolutionary era. (Note that George Washington, that quintessential role model, was known for his reticence and also for going back to civilian dress after the war was over). I think that Tyler is much gentler toward Maria, but she’s not perfect either.

I can’t think of any single character that Tyler would have wanted his readers to emulate completely. I think that most of his characters have admirable qualities, but they also have flaws. And maybe that’s the point: Americans don’t have to be perfect as individuals to have a republic, but they do have to be sufficiently moderate and open-minded to make their experiment work.

PWHNY: Charlotte’s opening anecdote about her stroll on the Battery seems to set the stage (so to speak) for a long tradition of conflating New York with the theater: the town, that is, seems to be one big performance situation. Do you think Tyler was trying to get at something he saw, as an outsider, as specific to New York, or are we being given insight into the nature of commercial society?

CK: Interesting point (about conflating NY with theater). I think that for anyone whose experiences had been primarily rural — a category that would have included the vast majority of Americans ca. 1787 — any city would have struck them as “one big performance situation.” The thing that might have made New York special in 1787 would have been its new status as the capital of the United States, which made it the stage on which the nation’s leaders (and prominent New Yorkers) enacted official and quasi-official rituals as they constructed the public culture of the republic. Philadelphia occupied this position both before and after New York’s brief stint as the center of government. (Note that NY was not the largest city in the U.S. at that time, nor was it the one with the most significant theater history.)

PWHNY: What do you think The Contrast has to teach us today?

CK: My students are really interested to learn that theater was so controversial — that people regarded the stage variously as a source of corruption and a source of education. Does that make theater the “new media” of late eighteenth-century America? On an even more basic level, by including characters from so many different ethnic backgrounds, Tyler’s portrait of New York teaches readers that the city — and, by extension, the United States — was born diverse, and that contemporaries saw diversity as an important aspect of their society. That’s a crucial insight and a useful counterpoint to those who would see the story revolutionary era as a top-down founders-focused sort of history.

PWHNY: Thanks for this conversation!

For many U.S. academics, Labor Day marks the end of summer: for my colleagues at NYU, tomorrow marks the beginning of the fall term. Today, therefore, seems like the right moment to announce Bryan’s and my new “course”: Virtual Writing New York, or vWNY for short.

I’m spending the academic year at NYU Abu Dhabi and Bryan is concentrating on other activities (including being Director of Undergraduate Studies), so our Writing New York course is on hiatus. But Bryan and I have always wondered what it might be like to teach that course over a full year, allowing ourselves the time to explore books currently on the syllabus in greater detail and to take a less hurried tour of the twentieth century by adding a few more titles.

vWNY is a step in that direction. It’s a thought experiment: Bryan and I are imaging what a year-long syllabus might look like for this year were we actually teaching Writing New York this year. We’ve put together a course schedule, and we’ll be writing blog posts that approximate the blog posts we would have written had we actually given the lectures that are listed on our virtual schedule.

So here’s the “syllabus” for the fall term. [Note that CCLNY stands for our Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York; EAD stands for Early American Drama, edited by Jeffrey Richards.]

Wed. Sept. 7: Introduction

Mon. Sept. 12: E. B. White, Here is New York (Little Bookroom)
Wed. Sept. 14: Excerpts from Russell Shorto, The Island at the Center of the World (Vintage)

Mon. Sept. 19: Washington Irving, A History of New York (Penguin)
Wed. Sept 21: Irving (continued); Elizabeth L. Bradley, “Dutch New York from Irving to Wharton” [CCLNY]

Mon. Sept 26: Royall Tyler, The Contrast [EAD]; Washington Irving, “Jonathan Oldstyle Letters”
Wed. Sept 28: The Contrast (continued); Bryan Waterman, “The City on Stage” [CCLNY]

Mon. Oct. 3: George G. Foster, New York by Gas-Light (University of California Press)
Mon. Oct. 5: New York by Gas-Light (continued)

Mon. Oct. 10 – HOLIDAY
Wed. Oct. 12: “MIDTERM” Contest

Mon Oct. 17: Anna Cora Mowatt, Fashion [EAD]
Wed. Oct. 19: Benjamin Baker, Glance at New York in On Stage America: A Selection of Distinctly American Plays, ed. Walter J. Meserve.

Mon. Oct. 24: Selected Poems and Journalism by Walt Whitman; Cyrus Patell, “New York, 1819–61”
Wed. Oct. 26:  Whitman (continued); Thomas Bender, “New York as a Center of Difference”  in The Unfinished City: New York and the Metropolitan Idea (NYU Press)

Mon. Oct. 31: Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and Excerpts from Moby-Dick; Thomas Augst, “Melville, at Sea in the City” [CCLNY]
Wed. Nov. 2: Melville (continued)

Mon. Nov. 7: Theodore Winthrop, Cecil Dreeme
Wed. Nov. 9: Cecil Dreeme (continued)

Mon. Nov. 14: Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick (Norton Critical Edition)
Wed. Nov. 16: Ragged Dick (continued)

Mon. Nov. 21: Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (Bedford Cultural Editions); Jacob Riis, “The Problem of the Children” and “The Working Girls of New York,” in the Bedford Maggie, 128–132 and 202–207.
Wed. Nov. 23: Wed. Nov. 30: Maggie (continued)

Mon. Nov. 28: Henry James, Washington Square (Penguin)
Wed. Nov. 30: Washington Square (continued)

Mon. Dec. 5: Abraham Cahan, Yekl and the Imported Bridegroom (Dover)
Wed. Dec. 7: Yekl (continued); Eric Homberger, “City of Immigrants: Politics and the Popular Cultures of Tolerance” [CCLNY].

Mon. Dec. 12: Wharton, The Age of Innocence (Penguin)
Wed. Dec. 14: The Age of Innocence (continued); F. Scott Fitzgerald, “My Lost City”; Sarah Wilson, “Beaufort’s Bastards” [CCLNY]

Mon. Dec. 19: “Final Examination” Contest

Our Twitter feed will be using the hashtag #vWNY to refer to the “course.”

Please join us for our introductory blog post after Wednesday’s hypothetical opening lecture!

At the outset Cary shared a quote from Alfred Leslie, who moved to the Lower East Side following WWII and took up a career as an artist. Tomorrow we’ll watch the famous film he made with the photographer Robert Frank, Pull My Daisy (1959), and think about it alongside the poetry of the Beat icons who feature as actors in the film. For today, Cary wanted us to think about people who walked these same streets in past eras. To that end he quoted Leslie:

There’s an essay at the end of Thoreau’s Walden on the pleasure of walking. I can’t recall it exactly, but it went something like this: “I wish to speak a word for walking and for wildness, for taking little walks along unmapped paths, like the saunterers of old….” After the war, the wild was no longer nature, it was the city. You had the feeling that you were starting out on a journey that had no end in sight, and from which you’d never return. There was an element of danger in it, and of psychic and primitive power…… Everything was accessible, if you went after it…. And it was particularly so on the Lower East Side which was like an abandoned part of the city.

We’re not sure where the quote comes from. (Does anyone out there recognize it?) I tried finding it on Google Books to no avail. Cary says he took it from the placards attached to the fence on the Second Avenue side of St. Mark’s Church, which we passed today on our walking tour. Wherever it comes from, it’s a terrific quote, encapsulating the thrill of walking in the city in a particular moment of time whose echoes are barely audible to us.

Photo of Alfred Leslie, 1960, by John Cohen, from Artnet.com.

The first is an undergraduate seminar called “Writing New York: The Downtown Scene, 1960-1980.” I pioneered it last summer as a way to get me in an appropriate frame of mind to work on my book for the 33 1/3 series. It’s a 2-week intensive seminar: four hours a day, five days a week, for two weeks. It’s baptism by immersion, and by the end of the second week we certainly feel like we’ve been through a full semester.

My second course this summer will be a graduate seminar called “New York in the Age of Warhol.” Compared to the undergraduate course, this one will have  luxurious pacing, spread out over six weeks. This is still quite a bit faster than a seminar in the regular semester, though, meeting twice a week whereas in the regular semester we’d meet once.

The two courses share over 90% of the same readings, which is one way I can keep this load manageable. They begin with some seminal figures on the downtown scene — Ginsberg, O’Hara, Cage — and end with Patti Smith’s glance backwards in Just Kids. I’m going to be curious to see, though, what effect the course title has on our discussion. What will it mean to foreground the concept of “scenes” over any particular personality? Or to define an era by the influence of one figure — Warhol? The grad seminar will have a heavier dose of Warhol, it’s true: we’ll read Popism in full and even tackle “his” novel, A. In my 33 1/3 book on Television’s Marquee Moon I consider, following the critic and filmmaker Mary Harron, the long shadow Warhol cast over the downtown underground rock scene, even as some bands (including Television) eventually sought to define themselves by breaking with the Warhol-influenced glitter scene that preceded them. Implicit in my account, I think, is my own sense that we’ve not yet escaped the Age of Warhol. Will we ever?

Over the next six weeks I’ll have more to say here. I’ll also be using the Twitter hashtag #downtown11 to indicate material relevant to our discussions. Feel free to follow along and join in as you’re inclined.

Photo: CBGB Pinball 1977, by Bob Gruen.

Wandering on to the bouton d’or drawing-room (where Beaufort had had the audacity to hang “Love Victorious,” the much-discussed nude of Bouguereau) Archer found Mrs. Welland and her daughter standing near the ball-room door. Couples were already gliding over the floor beyond: the light of the wax candles fell on revolving tulle skirts, on girlish heads wreathed with modest blossoms, on the dashing aigrettes and ornaments of the young married women’s coiffures, and on the glitter of highly glazed shirt-fronts and fresh glace gloves.

The notes to the Penguin edition that we’re using (edited by Cynthia Griffin Wolff and available for Kindle) tell us that “Adolphe-William Bouguereau (1825-1905), a French painter who won the Prix de Rome in 1850, was well known for us nudes.” What they don’t tell us is what I learned from T. J. Clark many years ago in an art history class: that Bouguereau was an “Academic” painter, a traditionalist who was popular in his day and consistently exhibit in the annual Paris Salon during his career.

Bouguereau never painted a painting called Love Victorious, but it’s thought that Wharton may have had this one in mind, Le Printemps (The Return of Spring), painted in 1886 and currently on display at the Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha, Nebraska:

Martin Scorsese used this picture to depict “Love Victorious” in his film adaptation of The Age of Innocence. Like many of Bouguereau’s nudes, it aspires to what we would think of now as photo-realism — except for the, er, putti. I talk about this painting in class as part of a larger discussion of the novel’s relation to the idea of realism: how can a novel compete (in terms of “realism”) with forms like visual forms like painting, photography, and film?

I then compare this painting with a painting by Gustave Courbet (a “Realist” with a capital R), entitled L’Origine du Monde (The Origin of the World), painted in 1866 and currently hanging in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Courbet once said, “I cannot paint an angel, because I have never seen one,” a remark that seems to be a deliberate swipe at Academic painters like Bouguereau. Here’s Courbet’s rendition of the origin of the world:

Bouguereau’s approach is idealized, mythological, allegorical; Courbet’s is amusingly literal.

So what should we make of Wharton’s use of Bouguereau? What does the reference signify? Is it a subtle way of indicating that Newland Archer’s Old New York, which thinks of itself as so cosmopolitan and worldly, is in fact quite provincial. Bouguereau may be scandalous in New York, but in Paris — well, he’s an Academic, not a provocateur like Courbet.

Or does the novel really “believe” that Bouguereau is scandalous? Is it unaware of the way in which Courbet and other Realists are upping the ante when it comes to nudes? Is the novel just as provincial as the New York it depicts?

I tend to think not, but the question I pose to the class is: What kind of evidence would you need to make an argument either way?

This invocation of Bouguereau is what I would call an exemplary moment in the text. But what does it exemplify? Let me suggest that the two questions I’ve just posed only scratch the surface of the complexity of this moment.

I generally read Moby-Dick as a dramatization of opportunities presented by a cosmopolitanism that is devoted to crossing the divides of human difference, that brings individuals together through the power of conversation conceived not only as interaction through speech but also — as Anthony Appiah puts it — “in its older meaning, of living together, association.”

In “Bartleby,” however, Melville dramatizes one of the problems that this model of cosmopolitanism faces: what happens when someone, like Bartleby, simply refuses to talk and by extension refuses to live together in association with others. The lecture suggested that one of the ills that seems to have beset democratic urban modernity is precisely the production of Bartlebys in one form or another.

As a way of investigating this idea, I proposed that there was a connection between Melville’s story and this picture, Edward Hopper’s Morning in the City (1944):

How do you get to Hopper from Melville? By way, I argued, of an insight from E. B. White’s Here is New York (1948):

On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy. It is this largess that accounts for the presence within the city’s walls of a considerable section of the population; for the residents of Manhattan are to a large extent strangers who have pulled up stakes somewhere and come to town, seeking sanctuary or fulfillment or some greater or lesser grail. The capacity to make such dubious gifts is a mysterious quality of New York. It can destroy an individual, or it can fulfill him, depending a good deal on luck. No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.

I think Hopper’s paintings of the city must have been lurking in the back of White’s mind as he wrote this passage, which is the first in his book. Unlike the teeming city depicted in Whitman’s poetry, Hopper’s city is seemingly devoid of inhabitants, as in this picture from 1921, Night Shadows:

Hopper paints people who are alone, often facing away from us and therefore anonymous, people who have far more in common with White’s vision of the city than Whitman’s.

Looking at Hopper’s paintings can tell us something about the kind of experience that Melville was seeking to depict in “Bartleby.” The narrator of Melville’s story thinks he learns something from his encounter with “Bartleby,” but I’m convinced that he doesn’t: I read the story’s final line — “Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity!” — as a conventional, even theatrical gesture designed to persuade us that the narrator has experienced something like an epiphany. But the very theatricality of the gesture belies the possibility of insight. Melville’s narrator has the same relationship to the scrivener as the viewer has to one of Hopper’s paintings: forever on the outside, separated by an ontological difference that seems absolute.

I’m usually in the business of historicizing the texts that we read in Writing New York, but in this case I think the juxtaposition of these two writers and one artist yields an insight that transcends particular historical context — or perhaps that suggests that continuities between mid-nineteenth-century and mid-twentieth-century New York.

The blogroll to the right includes all of these resources but also aspires to some degree of comprehensiveness, so forgive me for being a little more particular here. Also, I’m less interested for the purposes of this post in professionally produced resources than in blogs, which we see as producing an extraordinary amount of vital, open-ended writing that aims to interpret and preserve the city and its literary and cultural traditions. For a set of more traditional library-based resources, see Bobst’s suggestions for approaching research on New York. CUNY’s Gotham Center also has a terrific website also worth exploring. And, of course, our own Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York contains essays and reading suggestions that will guide those who have specific literary historical questions or concerns.

What follows is a set of blogs/Twitter feeds we find essential for students of New York history on the ground — material produced by ordinary New Yorkers who are attuned to noticing traces of the past still visible, or perhaps recently vanished. Some are written by academics or professional journalists, but many aren’t. We’d love to think this site aspires to be like some of these when it grows up. We’ve left historical societies and museums off this list, though we encourage you to look those up. You’ll find a longer list of our top 25 NYC Twitter feeds here. And I have a set of links on my personal website that more or less duplicates our blogroll but also includes resources for studying American culture more generally. Have fun exploring our blogroll too, which includes dozens of neighborhood- and news-oriented blogs. Please let us know if you’re aware of sites we’ve overlooked that obviously belong here. The only thing I won’t add are cupcake blogs. Sorry, SatC fans. Just the way it is.

The Bowery Boys — This is, simply, the best NYC history blog out there. They take their name from a nineteenth-century street gang and, later, the stars of film shorts, also known as the Dead End Kids, who typified for many Americans the insouciant attitude to be found on New York’s streets. Daily posts take up a range of topics, often but not always related to current events. Weekly podcasts go into greater depth, take you on the scene. Their archive is a treasure trove of NYC neighborhood/historical resources. Twitter: @boweryboys

Walking Off the Big Apple, a blog written by Villager Teri Tynes, updates the Baudelairean tradition of the flâneur, or city walker. Offering a series of self-guided tours, many with literary orientation, as well as gallery and museum guides, Tynes also takes you through the nooks and crannies of multiple neighborhoods and the ordinary workings of urban life. Travel sites pitch her as a resource, but locals should be checking her every day as well if they already aren’t. Twitter: @TeriTynes

Built Manhattan is a relatively recently launched blog by Michael Daddino, who formerly wrote one of our favorite NYC architecture sites, The Masterpiece Next Door. That project aimed to index Manhattan’s landmarked buildings. Built Manhattan is working its way through the city’s architectural history one year at a time, at least for years that are represented in the standing city. It’s a fun ride so far. Twitter: @epicharmus

Lost City is the Brooklyn-based granddaddy of NYC’s anti-gentrification blogs. Written by the pseudonymous Brooks of Sheffield, a freelance journalist and longtime city dweller with particular affection for old-time eating and drinking establishments. Last summer Brooks rocked the NYC blogosphere by announcing his site’s retirement. Luckily for us it seems to have been only temporary; for now, at least, we still have the opportunity to let Brooks look around and tell us what we may be missing soon, himself included. Twitter: we wish!

Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York works in the same vein, though he’s holed up closer by, in the East Village. Like most prophets, he’s got followers as well as people who reject his message, but that message is clear: recent decades have seen development on such an unprecedented and reckless scale that the very character of our city is in jeopardy. In the process of documenting closings and brushes with redevelopment, Jeremiah Moss (who started on the site as a fictional character created by the anonymous blogger) has done us all an enormous service by preserving an extraordinary amount of information and emotion about parts of the city that have disappeared or may soon be gone, from the Meatpacking District’s leather scene from decades past to Coney Island’s dive bars. We interviewed Jeremiah along with his compadre EV Grieve here. Twitter: @jeremoss

Inside the Apple is the companion blog to Michelle and James Nevius’ clever and handy historical guidebook to the city. The book contains 14 walking tours along with a wealth of key details and quirky anecdotes. The site specializes in the same, calling our attention to important anniversaries and to odds and ends that might otherwise end up in history’s dustbin, such as the fact that when the World Trade Center topped out it screwed up TV receptions in multiple boroughs. Print and web are both important companions. Twitter: @insidetheapple

Ephemeral New York operates on a simple principle: Its writer takes some scrap — a newspaper ad, an old postcard, a fading ad on the side of a building — and extracts a bit of information about the time and place that produced it, perhaps something about the people who were involved as well. The posts are short; the stories stick. She describes her own project as “chronicl[ing] a constantly reinvented city through … artifacts that have been edged into New York’s collective remainder bin.” A consistently delightful and informative blog. Twitter: we can only hope she’ll come around!

Forgotten New York is Kevin Walsh’s companion site to his stellar guide of the same name. His approach and concerns don’t overlap so much with the Nevius’, so don’t be deterred from checking out both books. Walsh does overlap with all of the above, however, in simple acts of noticing: seeing what’s still here that offers us little trails to follow into the city’s past lives. Walsh also leads walking tours of various hidden corners of the city–more information on his site. Twitter: @forgottenNY

Let us know what you think — and what resources, blog-based or otherwise, you find most useful.

Painting (1948) by Willem de Kooning. Enamel and oil on canvas, 42 5/8 x 56 1/8" (108.3 x 142.5 cm). Purchase. © 2010 The Willem de Kooning Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy moma.org

White’s photo is displayed in a room devoted to demonstrating that photographers were inspired by the same goals — defiance of expectations, playing with scale, expression through abstraction — that motivated painters like de Kooning. At first glance, it isn’t entirely clear what the photograph depicts, but once you see the title, you return to the photograph and begin to make out referential details that tell you that what you are seeing is indeed peeling paint. The relationship between title and image brings to mind the dynamics of titling in Abstract Expressionism more generally: some titles — like White’s or like or Barnett Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (1950-5) suggest the continuing referentiality of the image: the image is depicting something. Unless it isn’t and the title is a joke. Which is the case with Newman’s painting, shown below?

1950-51. Oil on canvas, 7' 11 3/8" x 17' 9 1/4" (242.2 x 541.7 cm). Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Ben Heller. © 2010 Barnett Newman Foundation / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Courtesy moma.org.

Others, like de Kooning’s, don’t seem to invoke referentiality: his Painting is just a painting. Unless it’s actually referential: look, the title tells us, you’re looking at paint.

Looking at the large paintings in the other rooms of the exhibition tells you something about how to understood White’s photograph, but White’s photograph can also get us to think about the paintings in a different way. Thought experiment: White uses the camera to render the real abstract. We can think, very concretely, about how that result is accomplished. So what if the painter’s “camera” is his or her head?

And, of course, when a photographer takes a picture of peeling paint is he inevitably “commenting” on the ephemerality of paint, perhaps uncannily predicting the fate of Mark Rothko’s mural for Harvard University’s Holyoke Center?

The photograph of White’s photograph, snapped with an iPhone and shown below, doesn’t nearly do justice to the beauty of the image. You’ll just have to go to MoMA and see it for yourself.

Peeled Paint on Store Window, San Francisco by Minor White. 1951. Gelatin silver print.

We’ll be traipsing around the city for the next three weeks and blogging our way through the course: we’ll be writing posts about the things we’re seeing and the reading we’re doing and the things that we’re thinking about the City and its relationship to the idea of “the modern.” And I mean we: I’ll be posting along with them, here at PWHNY. The students will each maintain an individual blog, with the posts aggregated at http://jterm.patell.org.

For their initial posts, I’ve asked the students to write about what they expect from New York, either from direct experience (in the case of our native New Yorker) or from all that they’ve heard and read about the city before coming to it.

Over the next three weeks, I’ll be asking the students to look for exemplary moments or objects — small things that seem to encompass something larger about the urban or the modern or both. Here’s my contribution:

The skyline. (This picture was taken as we landed back in New York after a family trip to Abu Dhabi in November.) If you’re a real New Yorker, that skyline never gets old. On that day after I received my job offer from NYU back in 1993, I flew out to UCLA where my then-partner was on the verge of receiving an offer. I’m one of those New Yorkers who doesn’t hate the idea of LA and indeed finds the city appealing (sorry, Woody), but as I took the taxi over to the Triborough Bridge to LaGuardia Airport, I looked out the window and saw the skyline emerge over the barriers at the side of the ramp, I suspected I wouldn’t be leaving New York in the end — and that even if I did a part of me never would.

A real New Yorker is always a New Yorker: no matter where he or she might happen to be living, that skyline indelibly marks what Whitman would call “the soul.”

It is our hope, however, that the Electra Street will present work in a variety of different manifestations. Part of what we are trying to do with Electra Street and with many of the projects we undertake at NYU Abu Dhabi is to rethink our practices from the particular vantage point — in space and in time — that being at NYU Abu Dhabi now offers us.With Electra Street, we are taking the opportunity to ask taking the opportunity to ask, “What should a 21st century ‘journal’ published in an emergent arts and humanities culture look like?” We hope that the project will take some kind of codified form by the end of this year academic year or early in the next, but I’m not prepared to say now what that form will be. Perhaps it will be published book, a DVD, a flash drive, or an app for the iPad — or some combination of these things. For now, we’ll be adding content each Sunday and developing a reservoir of exciting work from which to draw.

The project is headed by an editorial collective that consists of both students and faculty. The mission of the journal, expressed in the “Guidebook” that appears on the site, is to serve as “a forum for journeys undertaken by today’s academics and artists as they navigate the region and the globe, including the cities that host NYU’s global network such as Accra, Paris, London, New York, and Shanghai.” We’re hoping to establish smaller editorial collectives at each of NYU’s study-away sites, as well as in New York, each contributing to the project. I’ll be encouraging NYUAD students to serve as correspondents for the journal as the travel within the network (as early as this J-Term) and to join up with the collectives that will exist at the sites they visit during their semesters abroad. I can imagine a future in which both students and faculty participate in a network of editorial collectives as they spend time at different sites in NYU’s global network.

Given its title, the site uses a spatial metaphor for its organization and is divided into several sections. “Avenues” presents work of various kinds from the full range of disciplines in the arts and humanities. “Crossings” offers work that is interdisciplinary or multidisiciplinary or that defies conventional boundaries. “Progressions” presents ongoing colloquia or conversations on various topics within the arts and humanities. “On Location” takes a look at events at sites from across NYU’s global network.You can also use the “Roundabout” dropdown box at the bottom of the main page to locate work not only by section but also by genre. The “Search” box at the top of the page enables you to conduct free-form searching.

On the occasion of its launch, Electra Street featured the following pieces of work: videos from the Iktishaf Project, which is a collaboration between NYUAD and Zayed University in conjunction with the Abu Dhabi Film Festival; a phototext entitled “Istanbul: Why Photos Cannot Capture It,” in which Katherine James meditates on the Istanbul that lies outside the purview of the photographer’s lens; and the text of an address entitled “From Athens to Abu Dhabi,” given in Abu Dhabi by the historian David Levering Lewis, offering a history of the university from its earliest days to its present global incarnations; and an essay on the exhibition “No Customs” curated by artists Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, who are currently in residence at NYU Abu Dhabi. There is poetry by Julia Welsh with illustrations by Besiki Turazashvili. We also have the first installment of our “Colloquium on Cosmopolitanism” featuring the video that I recorded this summer “Cosmopolitan Ideas for Global Citizens” (and presented here in an earlier post).

The name “Electra” street has different connotations (and I expect its name to be the subject of an extended essay in the near future). People in New York immediately think of that tragic figure from Greek mythology, dramatized by Euripedes and Sophocles:the princess who, with her brother Orestes, plotted revenge against her mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus for the murder of their father, Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek invasion of Troy. In Abu Dhabi, however, that resonance is muted. “Electra Street” is the name commonly used for the street where NYU Abu Dhabi’s Sama Tower is located. The official name is Shaikh Zayed the Second Street. According to the Gulf News, the street “inherited its unusual name from an old video and electronic games shop of the same name that has since shut down.”

Electra Street welcomes submissions of original work and original research in the arts and humanities. We are developing guidelines for contributors, but if you’re raring to go, please send submissions as an e-mail attachment to submissions@electrastreet.net. For video submissions (or files that are to large to be e-mailed), please send a query to help@electrastreet.net.

Hope to see you on the Street!

[Photo Credits: The photo above appears on the Guidebook page of Electra Street, which currently contains the journal's mission statement. It is a satellite picture of the island of Abu Dhabi taken by International Space Station in March 2003, courtesy of the Image Analysis Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center. Source: http://eol.jsc.nasa.gov, Filmroll: ISS006-E-32079. Click here for detailed copyright information.]

[Cross-posted from patell.org.]