Hauptseminar New York in Contemporary Fiction Labyrinth Cosmopolis Palimpsest

This research-oriented BA/MA seminar provides an introduction into current debates on the structurally transformative impact of literary texts on urban environments, thus allowing students to participate in cooperative international research currently pursued in the American Studies programs at the UA Ruhr. -Cities are not simply material or lived spaces – they are spaces of the imagination and spaces of representations. How cities are envisioned has effects,” the sociologists Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson remind us. Focusing on America’s most demographically, linguistically, and socially complex city, this course explores the meanings and effects of three templates or models that US novelists have used to represent contemporary New York: the city as labyrinth, as cosmopolis, and as palimpsest. In the seminar, we will interrogate how these three figurations arise in response to a number of interconnected and coeval social, technological, and political developments of the last thirty years – from the rise of neoliberalism to the globalization of labor, capital, and culture to the explosive growth of memory cultures and discourses. These developments have remade the physical and social landscapes of all of urban American life, but perhaps nowhere more so than in New York where the postmodern dialectic of space-time compression and geographical unbounding, the centrifugal and centripetal whirlwinds of change, have been particularly pronounced. Recent urban fiction of New York City has sought to develop representational strategies to understand, construct, and reconstruct the city and its polyvocal, discordant, and contradictory meanings. As we make our way through the primary and secondary literature, we will study how contemporary novelists and scholars map the disorienting city, how they dramatize the clash between globalizing forces and communities seeking to hold on to and defend local heritage and memory, how they imagine the city both as a lived space and a network of transitory movements and migrations, and how they represent the multiple temporalities inscribed in the urban fabric. Finally, part of our work will be to scrutinize these three figurations (labyrinth, cosmopolis, palimpsest) for their limitations, blindnesses, and biases in their mediation of urban life and culture. Participants are expected to have purchased and read the primary material and reviewed the secondary material available of the library’s reference shelf before May. Primary Texts: Auster, Paul. City of Glass. New York: Penguin, 1987. Cole, Teju. Open City. New York: Faber & Faber, 2011. DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis. New York: Scribner’s, 2003. Secondary Texts: Harding, Alan, and Talja Blokland. Urban Theory. London: Sage, 2014. Bridge, Gary and Sophie Watson. -City Imaginaries.” A Companion to The City. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 7-17. De Certeau, Michel. -Walking in the City.” The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. 91-110. Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities. Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago/London: The U of Chicago P, 2003. Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. London: Verso, 2014. Edensor, Tim. -The Spaces of Memory and the Ghosts of Dereliction.” Industrial Ruins: Space, Aesthetics and Materiality. Oxford: Berg, 2005. 125-164. Fainstein, Susan S. and Michael Harloe. -Ups and Downs in the Global City: London and New York at the Millennium.” A Companion to The City. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 155-167. Farías, Ignacio, and Thomas Bender, eds. Urban Assemblages. How Actor Network Theory Changes Urban Studies. London: Routledge, 2009. Faßler, Manfred. -Vorwort: Umbrüche des Städtischen.” Urban Fictions: Die Zukunft des Städtischen. Ed. Manfred Faßler and Claudius Terkowsky. Munich: Fink, 2006. 9-35. Freyermuth, Gundolf S. -Edges & Nodes / Cities & Nets: The History and Theories of Networks and What They Tell us about Urbanity in the Digital Age.” Transcultural Spaces: Challenges of Urbanity, Ecology, and the Environment. Ed. Stefan L. Brandt, Winfried Fluck, and Frank Mehring. Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2010. 55-74. Heise, Thomas. Urban Underworlds: A Geography of Twentieth-Century American Literature and Culture. New York: Rutgers UP, 2011. Huyssen, Andreas. -Introduction” and -Present Pasts: Media, Politics, Amnesia.” Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 1-29. Jameson, Fredric. -Cognitive Mapping.” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Urbane: U of Illinois P, 1988. 347-360. Lenz, Günter H. -Postmodern New York City: Reconfiguring Urban Space, Metropolitan Culture, and Urban Fiction.” Postmodern New York City. Ed. Günter Lenz. Heidelberg: U of Heidelberg P, 2003. Sassen, Saskia. -Analytic Borderlands: Economy and Culture in the Global City.” A Companion to The City. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. 168-180. Sattler, Julia, ed. Spaces – Communities – Representations: Urban Transformations in the USA. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. Soja, Edward. -Cosmopolis: The Globalization of Cityspace.” Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2000. Vormann, Boris. Global Port Cities in North America: Urbanization Porcesses and Global Production Networks. London: Routledge, 2015. Anglistik Universität Duisburg-Essen SoSe 2016 Dr. Heise Thomas