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...

What’s in a name?

This week I begin teaching two summer courses, both of which are outgrowths of the Writing New York course I team-teach each year with Cyrus. The first is an undergraduate seminar called “Writing New York: The Downtown Scene, 1960-1980.” I pioneered it...

Wharton, Bouguereau, and Courbet

One of the questions that I asked in today’s lecture was what we should make of this passage from the third chapter of Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence (1920): Wandering on to the bouton d’or drawing-room (where Beaufort had had the...

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...