32204
Seminar
WiSe 14/15: Urban Imaginaries. The City in American Literature
Tomasz Stompor
Comments
Urban Imaginaries. The City in American Literature. For the most part of the twentieth century America has been regarded as a predominantly urban culture, if not as the defning urban culture of the twentieth century. Manhattan's skyline and its grid-network of streets have become the visual emblems of this assumption. Still, as many examples from American intellectual history show, urbanization and its effects were always conceived of in very ambivalent terms. With the onset of the waves of urban growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, attempts at understanding American culture were always formulated in a tension between the dynamism of the metropolis and a mythical rural past. The city has thus been conceptualized, either as the allegorical City upon a Hill, a New Jerusalem, or a New Canaan prominent in Puritan thought, or, especially since the forming of the new metropolises, as a jungle of prestigious wealth and depravity.This seminar will offer a survey of the various literary attempts to grasp the city and the dynamics of urban life from the colonial period through modernism until today, with a focus on narrative texts and poetry with some excursions into the visual arts. Credit requirements: active participation, oral presentation, term paper. close
16 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Mon, 2014-10-13 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2014-10-20 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2014-10-27 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2014-11-03 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2014-11-10 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2014-11-17 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2014-11-24 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2014-12-01 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2014-12-08 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2014-12-15 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2015-01-05 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2015-01-12 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2015-01-19 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2015-01-26 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2015-02-02 12:00 - 14:00
Mon, 2015-02-09 12:00 - 14:00