English 4 - Winter, 2011

Critical Inquiry and Literature

Topic: Urban Bodies: The City-Body Metaphor in American Literature & Culture

Class Information

Instructor: Tran, Ha
CRN: 22410
Time: MW 10:00-11:50
Location: 248 Voorhies

Description

The urban metaphor of the city as an organic, self-contained body dates back to the time of the ancient Athenians. For instance, we perceive a city as possessing a center (mind) controlling its various urban bodily “organs” extending throughout the city, enabling supervision and control over its denizens. Additionally, like the inviolate human body, the city has clear walls defining its borders.
This city-body metaphor inherently raises some difficult questions: how does the city construct itself as an organic entity? Where is its mind, its heart? Who draws the contours of this body and decides on the abject wastes to cast out of it? What happens to this metaphor when we begin thinking about the city in relation to racially marked bodies or gendered bodies and the anxieties that are inherent in discourses of embodiment and racial/gender otherness?

In this course we will explore the trope of city as body in a diverse array of seminal texts in American literature. We will trace the evolution of the American city from the turn of the century to the present and question the kinds of attitudes and assumptions that undergird the metaphor of the city as body and allow it to circulate and function as a social discourse. We will expand upon the latter idea in the form of putting our literary texts in conversation with representative examples from film and television, as well as excerpts from secondary texts on the city.

Grading

Grading will be based on short reading responses, a midterm project, one term paper, a final exam, and seminar participation.

Texts

Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
The House on Mango Street, Sandra Cisneros
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson
Assortment of poems (Allen Ginsberg, William Carlos Williams) and critical essays, Course Reader
Dark City (1998 film, available for rent at video stores, Netflix, etc.), dir. Alex Proyas
Blade Runner (1982 film, available for rent at video stores, Netflix, etc.), dir. Ridley Scott