Wednesday night, when the new NYU Bookstore (726 Broadway) kicks off its inaugural programming season by featuring our Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York, Brooklyn-based writer Caleb Crain will be reading from his piece on the literature of nineteenth-century New York’s affluent classes. In the chapter Caleb spends some time with Nathaniel Parker Willis, “the writer who invented the concept of [New York’s] upper ten thousand.” As Caleb notes, Willis remained somewhat ambivalent toward the upper classes and their social rituals, but he was particularly insightful about the role “fashion” played in shoring up the elite’s boundaries:
What did American fashion reward?
By the way, were we supposed to understand last night that Nate’s soon to be sleeping with the ACTUAL Gossip Girl? ZOMG.
Love the literary social networks thing. Reminds me – I was dealing with sociogram software (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociogram) in another class when researching the Television stuff, and I had this amazing idea in my head of this wiki-based online sociogram of the Downtown continuum. It could be called six degrees of Andy Warhol. I had some little charts drawn up just to keep track of sources, but it could be something really great. You’ve probably seen this, which is a similar idea but is totally linear: http://www.wardshelley.com/paintings/downtownbody.html
Also, glad someone is doing the REALLY difficult cultural research work: watching contemporary prime time television…but I saw a similar sort of graph mapping out the story lines of Twin Peaks, it was a glorious mess.
I took Writing New York in Spring ’09 and Prof. Waterman and Patell’s lectures about Edith Wharton (with Waterman’s occasional references to Gossip Girl) inspired the last couple of lines of my blog post for NBC Niteside (http://www.nbcnewyork.com/blogs/niteside/NTSD-Society-Crowd-Starting-to-Snub-the-Term-Socialite-Publisher-102051968.html)
I still remember your lectures vividly! Amazing class.
Here’s another link regarding the social networking/19c novels paper.
Thanks, Sean and Sara, for comments. Sorry they remained in moderation for a few days — I hadn’t checked to see if anything needed approval. Nice to hear from you both — and thanks for the links.