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Bryan and I have often thought how nice it would be if Writing New York were a full-year course rather than a semester-long course. One book that we would add to the syllabus is Ralph Ellison's marvelous novel Invisible Man, which I think is one of the great literary achievement s of the twentieth-century. At 581 pages, however, it seems like too much to ask our students to read in a week -- although I seem to recall that we did precisely that at the school where I was a graduate student. And given the chronology of our course it would have to be mid-April, already a rough time of year. Still, it's tempting ...

When the novel opens, our narrator - the "invisible man" of the title - is speaking to us from a basement in Harlem, or rather, a "border area"  somewhere near Harlem: "My hole is a warm and full of light. Yes, full of light. I doubt if there is a brighter spot in all New York than this hole of mine, and I do not exclude Broadway. Or the Empire State Building on a photographer's dream night."

The narrator arrives in New York at about p. 157. "How do you get to Harlem," he asks a Red Cap at the train station. "That's easy ... You just keep heading north." A few page earlier a black veteran warns the narrator about the dangers of the city:

"New York!" he said "That's not a place, it's a dream. When  I was your age it was Chicago. Now all the little black boys run away to New York. Out of the fire into the melting pot. I can see you after you've lived in Harlem for three months. Your speech will change, you'll talk a lot about 'college,' you'll attend lectures at the Men's House ... you might even meet a few white folks. And listen," he said, leaning close to whisper, "you might even dance with a white girl!"

Invisible Man is the first novel that we're reading in my summer graduate course on U.S. Fiction after 1940, which began this evening. One of the questions I asked, in order to set up our discussion of the novel for the next class, is what difference the New York setting makes to the novel. What do you think?

The New York setting certainly made a difference to Ellison. In a 1981 introduction to a reprinted edition of the novel, Ellison wrote: "In retrospect it was as though writing about invisibility had rendered me either transparent or opaque and set me bouncing back and forth between the benighted provincialism of a small village an the benign disinterestedness of a great metropolis. Which given the difficulty of gaining authorial knowledge of this diverse society was not a bad discipline for an American writer."

How would the addition of Invisible Man affect the stories we tell in  Writing New York, particularly the one about the city's cosmopolitan traditions? I'll have more to say on that score on later in the week.

As Bryan wrote earlier this week, we decided to end our Writing New York class on a dystopian note, with Frank Miller's graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns rather than on a more hopeful note as we've done in recent years -- with the blessing that concludes Tony Kushner's play Angels in America.

There's a way, though, in which we did manage to give Kushner the final word -- or, perhaps more appropriately, the final question. Because the final question on the final examination for the course was framed by a quote from Kushner:

This city is an example of a fantastic and completely unworkable variety of cultures, and consciousnesses, and generational differences, and sexual preferential differences, all living together in one place and forming a peaceable kingdom, a workable government, a real democracy, and creating a city that is genuinely an exciting civic space.

The quote comes from the supplementary materials included on the DVD version of Ric Burns's New York, and we invited the students to think about its implications in one of a number of different ways.

One topic arose from the idea of New York's "variety of cultures": we invited students to talk about ways in which different works on our syllabus had represented the interactions of enclaves, subcultures, or countercultures.

The second topic focused the idea of variety around the idea of cosmopolitanism, asking students to think about the promises and limitations of cosmopolitanism as dramatized in works we had read or seen during the term.

Students could also elect to talk about the implications of Kushner's idea of the "fantastic," by discussing the use of "realism" -- whatever they took that to mean -- and alternatives to it that we encountered over the course of the semester.

Finally, a fourth topic picked up on the slight tinge of uneasiness implicit in Kushner's statement. We suggested that, optimistic as it seems at first glance, Kushner's quote does suggest that there may be something dark or "unworkable" about New York City, and we invited students to thinking about works on our syllabus that dramatize New York's failure to make good on its utopian promises.

I guess we did end on a dystopian note after all.

Which of these questions did most of our students choose to answer? And what were some of the most interesting things that they wrote in response to the exam as a whole? We'll let you know later in the week.

I wanted to share one of my favorite scenes from Angels in America with you. Bryan mentioned it in lecture on Wednesday. It's the beginning of Part II: Perestroika, Act Four: John Brown's Body, Scene 6.

It features Prior Walter, one of the play's protagonists, who is dying of AIDS, his nurse-practitioner Emily, and Hannah, who is . . . well, you'll see.

Night. Prior, Emily (Prior's nurse-practitioner) and Hannah in an examination room in St. Vincent's emergency room. Emily is listening to his breathing, while Hannah sits in a nearby chair.

EMILY:  You've lost eight pounds. Eight pounds! I know people who would kill to be in the shape you were in, you were recovering, and you threw it away.

PRIOR: This isn't about WEIGHT, it's about LUNGS, UM . . . PNEUMONIA.

EMILY: We don't know yet.

PRIOR: THE FUCK WE DON'T ASSHOLE YOU MAY NOT BUT I CAN'T BREATHE.

HANNAH: You'd breathe better if you didn't holler like that.

PRIOR (Looks at Hannah, then): This is my ex-lover's lover's Mormon mother.

(Little pause.)

EMILY: Even in New York in the eighties, that is strange.

The scene is an example of the play's humor, but it also reinforces an important idea that runs throughout the play: the idea of cosmopolitanism.

New York emerges in Kushner's play as a cosmopolitan space of transformation. It's all about learning to embrace difference and change. Bryan cited one of my favorite concepts these days, what the philosopher Anthony Appiah calls "cosmopolitan contamination," in opposition to the idea of cultural purity. Bryan suggested that in a play about the early days of the AIDS epidemic, the idea of contamination as an inevitable and perhaps even necessary part of cultural change has an even greater force than it might if considered in the abstract.

Here's what Appiah says about contamination in an article from the New York Times ("The Case for Contamination," New York Times Magazine, January 1, 2006), which was adapted from his book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006):

Living cultures do not, in any case, evolve from purity into contamination; change is more a gradual transformation from one mixture to a new mixture, a process that usually takes place at some distance from rules and rulers, in the conversations that occur across cultural boundaries. Such conversations are not so much about arguments and values as about the exchange of perspectives. I don't say that we can't change minds, but the reasons we offer in our conversation will seldom do much to persuade others who do not share our fundamental evaluative judgments already. When we make judgments, after all, it's rarely because we have applied well-thought-out principles to a set of facts and deduced an answer. Our efforts to justify what we have done - or what we plan to do - are typically made up after the event, rationalizations of what we have decided intuitively to do. And a good deal of what we intuitively take to be right, we take to be right just because it is what we are used to. That does not mean, however, that we cannot become accustomed to doing things differently.

Angels in America is all about learning to do things differently, and the play understands the transformative power of conversation. The play, after all, ends with a conversation -- or rather two. The first conversation the conversation among four friends who have come together against all odds: Prior, the AIDS survivor; Louis, his ex-lover; Hannah, his ex-lover's lover's Mormon mother; and Belize, a gay African American male nurse who serves as the moral compass of the play. The second conversation is between Prior and us, the audience: it's the one that ends with the blessing that Bryan cited in a previous post.

And I think it's important the Prior uses the word "citizens" in the moments before he utters that blessing: "We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come."

What Prior is evoking is the idea of the world-citizen, a fundamental concept for cosmopolitan theory. It's the idea that each of us has a fundamental obligation to humanity as a whole. The time has come, Prior is telling us, to step up and be cosmopolitan, to be citizens of the world, to take responsibility for the way in which the world spins forward. That, in my reading, is what the play's final line -- "The Great Work Begins." -- ultimately signifies.

Today's lecture on Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989) presented the film as if it were a rejoinder to Woody Allen's Manhattan. It wasn't intended that way of course, but juxtaposing the two films enable us to highlight aspects of each film that might otherwise be obscured. From the perspective of Lee's Brooklyn, Woody Allen's Manhattan appears even more restricted in its purview, and deliberately retrograde in its nostalgia and final hopefulness. Meanwhile, watching Do the Right Thing with Allen's film in mind makes us more aware of the way in which Lee's film is deliberately stylized and artificial. Allen evokes romanticism through his use of Gershwin's music, but Lee's film has the same relation to cinematic "realism" that Hawthorne's "romances" had to the novels that he considered to be bound to a "minute fidelity" to the "ordinary and probable" (as he put it in his preface to The House of the Seven Gables): Lee needs to sprinkle in the "marvelous" in order to go beyond realism and reach what Hawthorne called "the truth of the human heart."

Watch the two openings for yourself below. Compare Lee's use of images, cinematography, music, and spoken words in the title montage for Do the Right Thing to Allen's use of these cinematic elements in Manhattan? In what ways are the montages different? What, for all their differences, do these two montages have in common?

The opening montage of Manhattan lasts for about 3 1/2 minutes. The opening credits for Do the Right Thing are a minute longer. 

My lecture yesterday on the Harlem Renaissance was framed by clips from two rather different documentaries about the movement: the 1993 PBS film Against the Odds: The Artists of the Harlem Renaissance and Isaac Julien's docu-fantasia, Looking for Langston (1988), which we described last year in the blog.

One of the virtues of Against the Odds is that it shows a side of the Renaissance rarely discussed in literature classrooms: the visual and performing arts. It does a good job of setting the Renaissance into an institutional context and highlighting the role of white patronage, with a particular focus on the efforts of the . Founded in 1922 by a white real estate developer named William E. Harmon (1862-1928), the Foundation sought to recognize African American achievements in visual and performing arts as well as in a variety of other fields.

Against the Odds is illuminating, if a little bit pious. In our course, the film also serves as an example of the kind of standard documentary that Looking for Langston seeks to queer. Indeed, Isaac Julien uses some of the same documentary footage used in Against the Odds.

Both films are available in DVD. Pick them up either at amazon.com or Netflix and cue them up for a double feature. You'll learn something not only about the Harlem Renaissance but also about the nature of "the documentary."

Bryan is lecturing on Alan Crosland's 1927 film The Jazz Singer, which is often described as the first "talkie," because of its use of the Vitaphone recording process. Actually, it's only the songs and some of the dialogue surrounding them that make use of the Vitaphone, and one of my favorite moments in the film occurs when Jolson's Jackie sings "Blue Skies" to his  mother (his "mammy"), played by Eugenie Besserer. Jolson ad libs dialogue here, and Besserer seems a little taken aback but tries gamely to play along. For most of the film, Besserer uses the broad acting styles that mark silent film and melodrama, in contrast to Jolson's seemingly more naturalistic style. But in this sequence, the father, played by Warner Oland, enters in and interrupts Jackie's song -- and the film abruptly switches to silent mode. It's a formal counterpart to what's going on thematically: the new, the modern, and the consensual are interrupted by the return of the old, the traditional, and the claims of genealogical descent.

The film serves several of our course's storylines: theater in New York, representation of ethnic cultures New York, the interplay of word and image in New York "writing," and New York's competition with Los Angeles to the site where the national popular culture is produced. In particular, we ask our students to think about these questions:

• What does it mean for the son of Jewish immigrants to be a Jazz Singer? To replace immigrant patriarchy with American sentimentalism ("Mother!")?
• In what ways and to what effect does this film preserve older or competing forms of cultural expression (print, stage, live music)?
• What do these preservations say about the relationship between New York and Hollywood as cultural capitals?

One of the things that often shocks the students is the film's use of blackface, and the first clip that Bryan shows is Jolson's "blacking up," looking in the mirror, and imagining his father the cantor singing at the synogogue.

This year, I'm put in mind of the comments that Ralph Ellison made about D. W. Griffith's landmark film The Birth of a Nation (1915). Ellison wrote," Usually The Birth of a Nation is discussed in terms of its contribution to cinema technique, but as with every other technical advance since the oceanic sailing ship, it became a further instrument in the dehumanization of the Negro."

Is the same kind of thing going on with blackface in The Jazz Singer? Spike Lee certainly thinks so, and if he has time today, Bryan will show the blackface montage that Lee created for his film Bamboozled (2000). You can watch it below:

In 2002, an all-white ad hoc committee of bookstore owners, libraries, publishers groups, and other groups such as the New York Women's Agenda decided that New York should emulate Chicago's successful "One Book, One City" program, which urged Chicago's residents to read and discuss Harper Lee's novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

The New York committee chose four finalists: Chang-rae Lee's debut novel, Native Speaker (1995); James McBride's memoir The Color of Water: A Black Man's Tribute to His White Mother (1996), Dennis Smith's 1972 memoir Report From Engine Co. 82, and E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime. Committee members then voted by e-mail, and Native Speaker edged out The Color of Water.

Controversy immediately ensued.

The contours of the controversy highlight some of the problems with the ways in which late twentieth-century institutional multiculturalism has encouraged us to read literary texts, particularly ethnic literary texts. One problem that became evident from committee members subsequent comments was the fact that many of them hadn't bothered to read the books carefully or even to finish them before voting. According to the New York Times, "John C. Liu, the first Asian-American councilman, said he had not finished [Native Speaker] but relished the idea of a book about an Asian-American councilman." In contrast, Barbara Gerard, a representative of the Women's Agenda on the selection committee and a consultant to the Board of Education, also admitted not finishing the book and wanted to reserve judgment until she had seen "if there is anything derogatory toward Korean-Americans or Asians at this point."

Gerard, like some other members of the committee, seemed to have a programmatic idea of multicultural reading, assuming that multicultural texts should be celebrations of particular ethnic identities.

Members of the committee who had dismissed Doctorow's Ragtime as insufficiently multicultural had either not read up to the novel's final pages, in which the rags-to-riches Jewish studio magnate imagines a film featuring "a bunch of children who were pals, white black, fat thin rich poor, all kinds, mischievous little urchins who would have funny adventures in their own neighborhood, a society of ragamuffins, like all of us, a gang, getting into trouble and getting out again," or simply dismissed the novel because it didn't include Asians or Latinos and spent a lot of time describing the lives of white people.

Ultimately, the New York Women's Agenda decided to withdraw from the program and promote the reading of The Color of Water, the biracial McBride's paean to his white mother, in part because of its greater attention to issues of gender and because, according to the Times, "Members of the group were concerned that Native Speaker was not engaging enough for high school students and might offend some Asian-Americans," presumably because two of its central characters are Asian and turn out to be flawed human beings. The controversy over Native Speaker suggests that the pursuit of multiculturalism often leads to an essentialism in which the depiction of particular minority characters is assumed to reflect on the character of the minority as a whole.

We've thought in the past about including Native Speaker on our Writing New York syllabus, in part because it draws inspiration from Whitman's view of New York's immigrants as the future of American democracy. Doctorow's Ragtime ends with a racially diverse, reconstituted nuclear family that strikes me as an emblem of hope for a cosmopolitan future. Native Speaker, too, dramatizes the necessity of pursuing cosmopolitanism, even as it dramatizes the failure of one man's cosmopolitan dream. It would indeed be a good fit for our syllabus. Which leads to the inevitable question: what should we drop in order to put it in?

E. L. Doctorow's 1975 novel Ragtime is the subject of today's lecture in Writing New York. We read the novel at the moment in the course when we are considering the turn into the twentieth century, not when we're talking about the 1970s (though I do bring the novel up again when we talk about Woody Allen's Manhattan). One of the subjects of the course at this point is the challenge that Hollywood begins to offer to New York as the place where American national narratives are going to be produced, as well as the challenges offered by film to the novel as a purveyor of realism in narrative.

We began to explore these questions with Wharton's Age of Innocence, and Ragtime offers an opportunity to continue the conversation -- in part because one of the novel's central characters transforms himself from a street vendor on the Lower East Side into a Hollywood film mogul in the course of the novel, but also because Doctorow makes explicit use of forms that he regards as cinematic. Doctorow once told an interviewer:

I don't know how anyone can write today without accommodating eighty or ninety years of film technology. . .

[From film] we've learned that we don't have to explain things. . . . My writing is powered by discontinuity, switches in scene, tense, voice, the mystery of who's talking.... Anyone who's ever watched a news broadcast on television knows all about discontinuity.

Readers of the novel have noted how Doctorow transposes into a novelistic key techniques that have become hallmarks of film such as montage and cross-cutting.

Comparing Martin Scorsese's film adaptation of The Age of Innocence to Wharton's novel can reveal the strengths and limitations of each genre, and it's fun to do something similar with Milos Forman's 1981 film adaptation of Ragtime. In the case of Wharton and Scorsese, what is primarily at issue is how film can convey the social meanings of the objects and actions it depicts. A film enable us to see surfaces, but how does it convey the depths of signification, what those surfaces mean to those who see them? Scorsese's solution is to turn back to Wharton's text, through the use of voice-over.

In Ragtime, the problem is how to convey the way in which the novel brings history alive by mixing fictional and historical characters, but taking us into the heads not only of its fictional protagonists, but also in to the heads of figures like Harry Houdini, Henry Ford, and Emma Goldman. In Forman's film, historical figures aren't protagonists: the film presents the stories of its historical figures through the use of newsreels that mix actual footage with recreations featuring actors from the film. (The one exception to this rule is Evelyn Nesbit, but that's because her story briefly becomes entwined with that of the character Mother's Younger Brother.) This simplification allows Forman to heighten the dramatic story of Coalhouse Walker, Jr., the fictional ragtime pianist who becomes a terrorist after a racial insult leads to the death of his girlfriend, who is the mother of his child.

But for film buffs, Forman manages to convey something like the novel's mix of the fictional and factual through its cunning use of the supporting cast. Jimmy Cagney, famous for playing gangsters and tough guys in films like The Public Enemy and White Heat, essentially comes out of retirement to play Commissioner of Police Rheinlander Waldo (invented for the movie: in the novel the character is District Attorney Whitman); the lawyer, Delmas, is played by Pat O'Brtien, Cagney's longtime pal (both on screen and off); the famous dancer Donald O'Connor plays Evelyn Nesbit's dancing instructor; and the architect Stanford White is played by Norman Mailer.

Nevertheless, Forman's film strikes the viewer as a well-executed piece of mainstream American cinema, whereas the novel still strikes readers, I suspect, as "experimental" fiction.

[There's an excellent volume of interviews available from the University Press of Mississippi called Conversations with E. L. Doctorow, edited by Christopher D. Morris. The photo above comes from The New York Times.]

The subject of today's lecture in Writing New York is Abraham Cahan's 1896 novel Yekl. We read it not only as a example of early twentieth-century ethnic realism, but also an example of the novel of manners. It's part of a unit that includes more predictable titles like James's Washington Square and Wharton's The Age of Innocence, as well as Stephen Crane's novel Maggie, which, like Yekl, is rarely included in the genre.

Sarah Wilson's essay for our Cambridge Companion to the Literatures of New York City, which is entitled "Beaufort's Bastards: New York Novels of Manners," also takes this approach. Wilson argues that

a significant proportion of turn-of-the-century New York novels expand the populations understood to be "mappable" by novels of manners: novels by William Dean Howells, Abraham Cahan, and Paul Laurence Dunbar bring into the tradition classes and cultures, races and ethnicities (and even literary genres, such as naturalism) not usually associated with manners literature as traditionally conceived. These novels share their preoccupation with manners with a polyglot host of other turn-of-the-century New York texts, reflecting the allure of manners--their diversity, even their exoticism--for chroniclers of a cosmopolitan society.

The title of Wilson's essay comes from the final dinner party scene in The Age of Innocence, when one snobbish character remarks, "If things go on at this pace, . . . we shall see our children fighting for invitations to swindlers' houses, and marrying Beaufort's bastards." Julius Beaufort is an example of "new money," whose origins are mysterious (read: possibly Jewish) and whose conduct is regarded as boorish -- though the novel's characters are more than happy to attend his annual Opera ball. Wilson argues that for The Age of Innocence, as for the New York novel of manners more generally, "marrying Beaufort's bastards" is a good thing, a sign of cosmopolitan change.

Cahan's novel offers a useful example of the conflict between descent and consent that the critic Werner Sollors has described as a "central drama in American culture." In Beyond Ethnicity, Sollors describes descent relations as "hereditary" and "ancestral," in contrast to consent relations, which are "contractual" and "self-made." Sollors continues:

Descent relations are those defined by anthropologists as relations of "substance" (by blood or nature); consent relations describes those of "law" or "marriage." Descent language emphasizes our positions as heirs, our hereditary qualities, liabilities and entitlements; consent language stresses are abilities as mature free agents and "architects" of our fates to choose our spouses, our destinies, our political systems.

Yekl is about one man's effort to transform himself from the Old World "Yekl" to the New World "Jake," to Americanize himself. When his wife Gitl, arrives at Ellis Island, with their young son, complications ensue.

I'll be talking about Yekl throughout the week. It's available in an edition from Dover. Click here to find an e-text of the novel.