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WRITING THE CITY: THEORIES OF SPATIALITY |
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DESCRIPTION OF THE COURSE Growing out of my current research, this course will examine the ways that writers, cultural theorists, and geographers have conceptualized the city. The course’s initial premise builds primarily on the spatial theories of “critical,” post-Marxist geographers (Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and Edward Soja) and of the Frankfurt School (Walter Benjamin) and : the idea that effective cultural critique depends upon demystifying abstract models of Cartesian space as an empty void or a realm of things. The course will examine theories of how space is culturally produced, how it embeds and often hides a history of class and economic conflict, and how popular spatial myths (such as pastoral and Romantic images of “nature”) fetishize space. These theoretical insights will be used to study the spatial practices of a range of antebellum New York writers: Edgar Allan Poe, Lydia Maria Child, Margaret Fuller, Fanny Fern, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. REQUIRED TEXTS Edward Soja, Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places (Blackwell) Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Blackwell) Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers (Oxford Univ. Press) Edwin Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York to 1898 (Oxford Univ. Press) Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Harvard Univ. Press) David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York (Univ. Of Georgia Press) Margaret Fuller, Margaret Fullers New York Journalism (Univ. Of Tennessee Press) Fanny Fern, Ruth Hall and Other Writings (Rutgers Univ. Press) Herman Melville, Pierre (Northwestern Univ. Press) Walt Whitman, Poetry and Prose (Library of America) COURSE READER |
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