ENGL 388
Genres of the City Spring 2014
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

How do you tell a story about an entire city? Could even the most capacious of novels be vast enough to contain London itself? Or, might the sublime miniaturizations of lyric poetry reproduce the perils and thrills of delving into the city’s crowded streets? This course asks by what literary devices might a writer wrap her or his arms, as it were, around the modern metropolis as it emerged in nineteenth-century Britain. We will focus on a series of efforts by writers as they test out a range of literary genres large and small-the realist novel, the urban sketch, the lyric poem, among others-in order to figure city life and the modern urban scene in all its buzzy, bewildering glory. Some of our questions: Does the city have a signal literary genre? Do literary forms produce a kind of cognitive map of urban terrain? Do novels need cities, as engines of plot and complexity? Do cities need novels, as symbolic forms to apprehend this vast new urban space? What about poems? How is urban consciousness, or disorientation, best rendered on the page? Or, is the project of rendering the metropolis in writing a sort of genre vampirism, with literature hoping to usurp the forms of experience afforded by the modern city? Alongside literary texts, we will read a number of historical and contemporary theorists of the city and its genres. Among our authors: Wordsworth, Dickens, Henry Mayhew, Oscar Wilde, Conan Doyle, RL Stevenson, and one contemporary novelist, Zadie Smith. Among our theorists: Fredric Jameson, Georg Simmel, Erving Goffman, Walter Benjamin, Franco Moretti.