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Course Syllabus

ΛΕ178, E’ Εξάμηνο, Μάθημα Επιλογής

The City in Anglophone Fiction

Course Description:

Inspired by Ezra Pound’s declaration, “All great art is born of the metropolis,” this course will focus on the literary portrayal of the city from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. In the nineteenth century, we will think about the realist London of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens. Henry James’s New York chapters from The American Scene begins our examination of the twentieth-century modernist city, while London emerges as the protagonist in both Dorothy Richardson’s long novel The Tunnel and Virginia Woolf’s less lengthy “Street Haunting.” Scrutinising the inter-war years, the course moves to the Mediterranean South through Walter Benjamin’s and Asja Lacis’s essay “Naples”. The second half of the twentieth  century and the emergence of postmodernism features Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Pedestrian” and its imaginary Los Angeles. Our venture into the twenty-first century is John Berger’s memoir and travelogue The Red Tenda of Bologna. Literary genres (novel, travel writing, short story, essay, memoir) will be read as studies of the urban space that foreground a broad range of topics, such as spectatorship, pedestrianism, dwelling, war, gender, the body, race, class, and empire. What are the forms or genres, narrative strategies, tropes and motifs that texts employ to register the history, multiple layers, and sensorial experience of the city? How do texts showcase the fraught relationships between city, nation, world?

Course Objectives:

Students in the course will learn to

— interpret, analyse, and evaluate the literary imagination of the city in its social, and cultural

dimensions. 

—use critical theory and scholarly writing to challenge Manichean narratives of urban capitalist transformation or urban decay.  

—evaluate the vision of human experience in its individual, social, and cultural aspects, as expressed by several significant literary texts.

—familiarise themselves with seminal works of critical theory that have defined urban studies.

—employ methodological tools to critically read theoretical essays that discuss the literary works under scrutiny, the form and content of the texts.

Week by Week Syllabus

Week 1. Introduction to City Theory: 

Michel de Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. 

Raymond Williams. “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism.” Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. and Intr. Peter Booker. New York: Longman, 1992.

Georg Simmel. “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903). The Blackwell City Reader. Eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002.

Week 2. Coffeeshop, Hotel, Theatre, Bazaar, Gin palace: the Birth of the Flâneur

Edgar Allan Poe. “The Man of the Crowd” (1840).  

Listen to it as narrated by Frank Landsman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5Xx8ulZNEg.

Further Reading: 

Benjamin, Walter, and Michael William Jennings. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Harvard University Press, 2006 [excerpts pp. 79-85, 186-190].

Bran, Nicol. “Reading and Not Reading ‘The Man of the Crowd’: Poe, the City, and the Gothic Text.” Philological Quarterly 91.3 (2012): 465-493.

Week 3. The city palimpsest at night.

Charles Dickens. “Arcadian London.” The Uncommercial Traveler (1861-8) [pp. 115-121 in pdf] 

——. “Nightwalks.” The Uncommercial Traveler  [pp. 93-98 in pdf]

Listen to the two texts in the audiobook here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6N9R1orGp9U

Further Reading:

Keirstead, Christopher M. “Dickens, Travel Disorientation, and the Emergence of the Modern Literary Travel Essay: or, ‘A Flight’ (and ‘Night Walks’) on flight.” Studies in Travel Writing 19.4 (2015): 340-357.

Simmel, Georg. (1994). “Bridge and Door.” Theory, Culture & Society, 11(1), 5-10. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327694011001002 

Buck-Morss, Susan. “The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: The Politics of Loitering.” New German Critique 39 (1986): 99–140. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/488122.

Week 4. Return to New York, the city as memory, the city as spectacle. 

Henry James. “New York Revisited” and “New York Social Notes” from The American Scene. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907.

Further Reading: 

Carmines, Henry. “Reading Henry James Atmospherically: The Case of The American Scene.” Leaves, 2023. Hal-04180098v2.

Tamara Follini. “Habitations of Modernism: Henry James’s New York, 1907.” The Cambridge Quarterly 37. 1 (2008): 30-46. Sp. Iss.: Henry James in the Modern World. Project Muse. 

Wendy Graham. “Notes on a Native Son: Henry James’s New York.” American Literary History 21. 2 (2009): 239-267. Project MUSE. 

Pete Kuryla. “A Very Brief Reader’s Guide for Henry James’ American Scene”. Web. https://s-usih.org/2017/02/a-very-brief-readers-guide-for-henry-james-american-scene/.

Week 5. The New Woman in the streets I

Dorothy Richardson. The Tunnel (1919) 

Further reading:

Epstein Nord, Deborah. “The Urban Peripatetic: Spectator, Streetwalker, Woman Writer.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46. 3 (1991): 351-75. JSTOR. University of California Press.

Eric Hobsbawm. “The New Woman.” The Age of Empire 1875-1914. New York: Random House, 1989. 192-218.

Woolf, Virginia. “The Tunnel.” Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing. Ed. Michele Barrett. London: The Women’s Press LTD, 1979.

Week 6. The New Woman in the streets II

Dorothy Richardson, The Tunnel (1919).

Further reading:

Hidalgo, Pilar. “Female Flánerie in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 6 (1993): 93-98. 

McCracken, Scott. “Voyages by Teashop. An Urban Geography of Modernism.” Geographies of Modernism. Edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Oxon: Routledge, 2005. 86-98.

Sim, Lorraine. “Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage and the Society of the Street.” Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 6 (2013): 63–83. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26653403

Week 7. 90 mins Mid-term Exam. “Street Rambling” in London: Observing and Buying.

Virginia Woolf. “Street Haunting. A London Adventure.” (1927).

Listen to the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r93rCPhQzWI.

Browse Yale’s Modernism Lab on Woolf: https://campuspress.yale.edu/modernismlab/virginia-woolf/

Further Reading: 

Tracy Seeley. “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ and the Art of Digressive Passage.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 15. 1 (2013) 149–60. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.14321/fourthgenre.15.1.0149.

Kathryn Simpson. “‘Street haunting,’ Commodity Culture, and the Woman Artist.” Woolf and the City. Edited by Elizabeth F. Evans, Sarah E. Cornish. Liverpool University Press, 2010. 47-54.

Randi Saloman. “‘Here Again is the Usual Door’: The Modernity of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting.” Genre XXXVIII (2005): 71-94.

Week 8. Naples as theatre of life. 

Round-table discussion and close-reading workshop on the theoretical offshoots of:

Walter Benjamin and Asja Lacis. “Naples” (1925). Walter Benjamin. Reflections. Essays, Aphorisms, Biographical Writings. Transl. Edmund Jephcott. New York: A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986. 163-173.

Further Reading: 

Andrew Benjamin. “Porosity at the Edge: Working through Walter Benjamin’s “Naples.”  Architectural Theory Review 10.1 (2005): 33–43. https://doi.org/10.1080/13264820509478527. 

Week 9. Botanising the asphalt in Los Angeles.

Ray Bradbury, “The Pedestrian” (1951) read with 

Walter Benjamin, Excerpts on the Flâneur (handout and pdf)

Listen to the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63uSon_eOPE

Further Reading:

Matthew Beaumont. “Stumbling. Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Pedestrian.’” The Walker. On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City. London: Verso 2020.

Week 10. Racial Encounters on the Bus in the American South

Flannery O' Connor, “Everything that Rises Must Converge” (1963) and 

Flannery O' Connor, “The Serous Writer and the Tired Reader”

Listen to the story here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=83HEGMU_N68

Listen to “Strange Fruit” by Billie Holiday and look up the lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=-DGY9HvChXk

Further Reading:

How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor? She has become an icon of American letters. Now readers are reckoning with another side of her legacy. By Paul Elie, June 15, 2020: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/06/22/how-racist-was-flannery-oconnor?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

Week 11. City and Wanderer: Searching for the dead in contemporary Bologna. Invited Speaker: PhD Student Nikos Stratigakis (PhD Title: “The Dynamics of Space in Modernist Poetry”). Lecture topic: "In and out the Lower East Side: Lola Ridge's The Ghetto and beyond".

John Berger. The Red Tenda of Bologna (2007). New York: Penguin Books, 2017.

Watch this video on Berger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pDE4VX_9Kk

A BAFTA award-winning BBC series with John Berger, which rapidly became regarded as one of the most influential art programmes ever made. In this first programme, Berger examines the impact of photography on our appreciation of art from the past. Ways of Seeing is a 1972 BBC four-part television series of 30-minute films that criticise traditional Western cultural aesthetics by raising questions about hidden ideologies in visual images.

Further Reading:

Linda Hutcheon. “Telling Stories: Fiction and History.” Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. and intr. Peter Brooker. Essex: Longman Group UK Limited, 1992. 229-242.

Harvey J. Kaye. “Historical Consciousness and Storytelling: John Berger’s Fiction.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 16. 4 (1983) 43–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24777713.

Week 12. Student Presentations. 

Week 13. Review of all course material for the final exam.

General Info

All primary and secondary material will be made available online through the e-class in pdf form. 

Requirements: Students are required to have read the material before each class. Active participation is both encouraged and expected. 

Assessment and Credit: The final grade will be based on the students’ performance in the final exam or the oral presentation and the final exam. Students are strongly advised to work on an individual or pair presentation on any of the material that is discussed throughout the semester. This is an important part of the course and will offer as much as two (2) points towards the final grade.

Class Presentations:

In pairs or individually you can undertake a class presentation (for up to two extra points for

each student to be added to a passing grade from the final exam) which will develop one of the

themes discussed in class. These presentations will be scheduled for Week 12  and will be peer-reviewed by your classmates.

For the presentation students should

ï Discuss at least one of the primary literary texts studied. Choose a topic/theme/particular extract from the studied texts and draw connections to the larger context of the course.

ï Look at their notes, but not passively read the whole thing.

ï Engage in serious academic research rather than use AI sources copy-pasting randomly what they find online.

ï Make a powerpoint that includes references for all citations.

ï Prepare a 1-2 page handout in which they may include important quotations, topics covered, works consulted, and/or other relevant information.

ï Provide the instructor with a written version, which includes their main points (bullet points or notes) as well as the secondary sources they consulted and used.

Students will be assessed on extensiveness of research, use of secondary academic sources, coherence of your presentation, and manner of delivery.

Topics and primary sources should be sent to the instructor beforehand for approval and in order to ensure that your topics of choice do not overlap. 

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter, and Michael William Jennings. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Harvard University Press, 2006.

Benjamin, Walter. “O, Prostitution, Gambling.” The Arcades Project. Harvard: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002. 489-515.

Matthew Beaumont. “Stumbling. Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Pedestrian.’” The Walker. On Finding and Losing Yourself in the Modern City. London: Verso 2020.

Berger, John. The Red Tenda of Bologna. New York: Penguin Books, 2017.

Bran, Nicol. “Reading and Not Reading ‘The Man of the Crowd’: Poe, the City, and the Gothic Text.”  Philological Quarterly 91.3 (2012): 465-493.

Carmines, Henry. “Reading Henry James Atmospherically: The Case of The American Scene.” Leaves, 2023. Hal-04180098v2.

de Certeau, Michel. “Walking in the city.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. 

Epstein Nord, Deborah. “The Urban Peripatetic: Spectator, Streetwalker, Woman Writer.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 46. 3 (1991): 351-75. JSTOR. University of California Press. 30 September 2012.

Frigerio, Francesca. “‘Imperialism Wants Imperial Women’: the Writing of History and Evolutionary Theories in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.” Pilgrimages: A Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 3 (2010): 6-25. 6 July 2011.

Hidalgo, Pilar. “Female Flánerie in Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 6 (1993): 93-98. 3 August 2013. 

Hobsbawm, Eric. “The New Woman.” The Age of Empire 1875-1914. New York: Random House, 1989. 192-218.

Hutcheon, Linda. “Telling Stories: Fiction and History.” Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. and intr. Peter Brooker. Essex: Longman Group UK Limited, 1992. 229-242.

Follini, Tamara. “Habitations of Modernism: Henry James’s New York, 1907.” The Cambridge Quarterly 37. 1 (2008): 30-46. Sp. Iss.: Henry James in the Modern World. Project Muse. 

Graham, Wendy. “Notes on a Native Son: Henry James’s New York.” American Literary History 21. 2 (2009): 239-267. Project MUSE. 

James, Henry. The American Scene. London: Chapman and Hall, 1907.

Kaye, Harvey J. “Historical Consciousness and Storytelling: John Berger’s Fiction.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 16. 4 (1983) 43–57. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24777713.

Keirstead, Christopher M. “Dickens, Travel Disorientation, and the Emergence of the Modern Literary Travel Essay: or, ‘A Flight’ (and ‘Night Walks’) on flight.” Studies in Travel Writing 19.4 (2015): 340-357.

Kuryla, Pete. “A Very Brief Reader’s Guide for Henry James’ American Scene”. Web. https://s-usih.org/2017/02/a-very-brief-readers-guide-for-henry-james-american-scene/.

McCracken, Scott. “Voyages by Teashop. An Urban Geography of Modernism.” Geographies of Modernism. Edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker. Oxon: Routledge, 2005. 86-98.

Robinson, Brian. “Charles Dickens and London: The Visible and the Opaque.” Geo Journal 38. 1 (1996): 59–74. JSTOR. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41146704.

Saloman, Randi. “‘Here Again is the Usual Door’: The Modernity of Virginia Woolf’s Street Haunting.” Genre XXXVIII (2005): 71-94.

Seeley, Tracy. “Virginia Woolf’s ‘Street Haunting’ and the Art of Digressive Passage.” Fourth Genre: Explorations in Nonfiction 15. 1 (2013): 149–60. JSTOR. https://doi.org/10.14321/fourthgenre.15.1.0149.

Sim, Lorraine. “Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage and the Society of the Street.” Pilgrimages: The Journal of Dorothy Richardson Studies 6 (2013): 63–83. JSTOR. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26653403.

Simmel, Georg. “The Metropolis and Mental Life.” The Blackwell City Reader. Eds. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson. Oxford and Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002.

Simpson, Kathryn. “‘Street haunting,’ Commodity Culture, and the Woman Artist.” Woolf and the City. Edited by Elizabeth F. Evans, Sarah E. Cornish. Liverpool University Press, 2010. 47-54.

Williams, Raymond. “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism.” Modernism/Postmodernism. Ed. and Intr. Peter Booker. New York: Longman, 1992.

Woolf, Virginia. “Street Haunting. A London Adventure.” Web.

————. “The Tunnel.” Virginia Woolf: Women and Writing. Ed. Michele Barrett. London: The Women’s Press LTD, 1979.