New York Exceptionalism

New York Exceptionalism

Had I actually given a lecture today in Writing New York, I would have taken up the theme of New York exceptionalism introduced in my discussion of E. B. White’s Here is New York on Monday. Today’s reading would have been drawn from Russell Shorto’s history of...
Changing Horizons

Changing Horizons

It was an interesting experience, rereading E. B. White’s Here is New York on 9/11. It reminded me how valuable a tool the concept of the horizon of expectations is for literary critics. Coined by the literary historian and reader-response theorist Hans Robert Jauss,...
Introducing vWNY

Introducing vWNY

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...

See It to Believe It

One of the ways that I have typically contextualized the final pages of E. B. White’s Here is New York has been to show a clip from Edward R. Murrow’s news program See It Now, which began its life as a radio program called Here It Now, but moved to...

Melville, Hopper, White

In my lecture last month on Herman Melville’s story “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Tale of Wall Street” (1853), I presented the story as a meditation on the kinds of selves that democratic urban modernity was producing in the United States in the middle...