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S1510 Literature and the City: A Global Perspective

Gomel Elana

Modernity is inseparable from the big city, its crowds, spectacles, sounds, and smells. The explosive growth of cities at the beginning of the 19th century paved the way for industrialization, technological revolution, and global capitalism. It also created a particular type of artistic sensibility: the flâneur, the alienated but curious explorer of the many urban worlds. In modern literature, the city often becomes the protagonist, eclipsing in importance individual characters. In this course we will discuss the role of the city in modern literature. Starting with the Victorian metropolis of Charles Dickens and Arthur Conan Doyle, we will follow the changing images of the city to contemporary urban fantasy and beyond.
The impact of the city is not limited to Anglophone literature. The 21st century is marked by the rise of global cities, such as Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, and Mumbai. The urban politics of globalism pose a challenge to the power of the nation state and offer a promise of greater freedom and mobility. As Derrida puts it in his essay “On Cosmopolitanism”: “Could the city, equipped with new rights and greater sovereignty, open up new horizons of possibility previously undreamt of by international state law?” At the same time, 21st-century global cities are plagued by problems similar to those of the Victorian metropolis: increasing social and economic inequality, overpopulation, and crime. We will consider how the Victorian and modernist legacy of the urban novel is creatively transformed by writers across the globe.


Goals of the course:
Familiarity with the cultural history of the city.
Capacity to analyze contemporary texts in their historical contexts.