Literature and the City

This subject explores the deeply intertwined relationship between literature and the city. On the one hand, the rise of the modern metropolis saw the production of new literary modes as writers responded to changing social and economic relations, new opportunities for self-fashioning and cultural exchange, as well as experiences of exploitation, segregation and exclusion. On the other hand, the literary imagination itself has produced indelible urban worlds and underworlds, from James Joyce’s Dublin, Virginia Woolf’s London or Claude McKay’s Marseille, to novels, short strories and speculative fictions that reimagine Singapore, Melbourne or Johannesburg. Reading widely across twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary geographies, students will engage with different genres of city writing – poetry, short story, novel, and graphic novel -- as well as read theoretical texts that explore key concepts such as the production of space, the flaneur, space and gender, the imperial/colonial metropolis and the global city.

• 1Discuss the major genres, forms and lines of development of city literatures.
• 2Apply critical and analytical skills to a diverse body of city literature.
• 3Articulate the relationship between diverse forms of city literature and the urban cultural contexts that produced them.
• 4Develop new reading methodologies relevant to the study of space and literature.
• 5Act as critically informed participants within a community of city literature scholars.