Instructor: Tara K. Menon
Monday & Wednesday, 9:00-10:15am | Location: Sever 103
Course Site
Cities are made of contradictions: playgrounds for the rich and sites of concentrated poverty, highly organized and totally chaotic, an endless party and the loneliest places on earth. How do we write about them? In this course, we will visit four major metropolises around the world: London, Bombay, New York, and Seoul. We will focus primarily on one narrative work set in each of these cities—Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Hwang Sok-yong's At Dusk—and supplement our reading with short stories, journalism, sociology, and movies by writers including: Zadie Smith, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Katherine Boo, and Spike Lee.
What techniques do fiction writers, journalists, and filmmakers use to capture the constituent features of life in urban environments? What can one genre do that another cannot? How do these narratives represent social interactions? How do they depict interiority and consciousness? What kinds of characters are included in the field of vision? What kind of labour, if any, is represented? How, if at all, does the identity of the writer shape the stories they are telling? Other topics under consideration: class, race, gender, industrialisation, finance, greed, alienation, strangers, estrangement, economic inequality, cosmopolitanism, crime, immigration. No previous experience in English Department courses is required.