English 184cf. City Fictions

Instructor: Tara K. Menon
Tuesday & Thursday, 9:00-10:15am | Location: TBD

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’s Bleak House, Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Hwang Sok Young’s At Dusk—and supplement our reading with short stories, journalism, sociology, movies, and television by writers and directors including: Zadie Smith, Micaela Coel, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, Katherine Boo, Spike Lee and Bong Joon-Ho.