Hauptseminar New York Writers

This course will take you on a guided tour of all five boroughs of New York, investigating the uneasy relationship between this great city and the rest of America, as portrayed by a range of classic and contemporary writers, including Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Edith Wharton, Herman Melville, John Dos Passos, Dorothy Parker, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, E.B. White, J.D. Salinger, Elizabeth Hardwick, Woody Allen, Tom Wolfe, Candace Bushnell, Tama Janowitz, Siri Hustvedt, E.L. Konigsberg, Edwidge Danticat, and Mary Cantwell. Attempts to define what is unique about -the city,- as the natives say, will be explored, for instance E.B. White's praise of New York as a place offering -the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.- We will read poetry, short stories, one children's novel, and essays from the Best American Essays collections. A reader will be made available, but students should purchase the following: E.L. Konigsberg, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil. E. Frankweiler (1972) Recommended Reading (NOT Required) Writing New York: A Literary Anthology , ed. Phillip Lopate (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1998, 2008) Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s , by Ann Douglas (New York: Noonday, 1995) You Must Remember This: An Oral History of Manhattan from the 1890s to World War II , by Jeff Kisselgoff (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1989) Harpo Speaks . . . About New York , by Harpo Marx with Rowland Baker (New York: The Little Bookroom, 1961) New York: Then & Now , by Marcia Reiss (San Diego, CA: Thunder Bay Press, 2005) New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2007) Anglistik Universität Duisburg-Essen WS 2012/13 Master, Master Dr. Knox Raab Melissa