Imagining New York City WNY 311

Instructor: Dororthy Wang

New York City is one of the great cultural cities of modern history. In the past century, huge number of literary, artistic and musical efflorescences have occurred here, and its artists and writers have produced the most diverse cultural products on the globe. This course will examine particularly noteworthy moments of cultural eruption that have taken place in the city, and we will come to understand why they happened in NYC and not anywhere else. While we will pay close attention to the artistic ;and formal aspects of these works, we will also see how these cultural products are rooted both in geographical sites (particular neighborhoods, the urban cityscape and its structures—bridges, subways, skyscrapers) and in various communities (artistic, ethnic, underground, rarified, gay, elite), many overlapping. New York, while very real, also exists as a place in the American imaginary. This coursewill examine writers and artists working both uptown (Harlem), downtown (the Lower East Side, the Village, Chinatown, Wall St.) and Brooklyn. We will look in particular at works which chronicle poverty (Stephen Crane, Jacob Riis) and wealth (Henry James, Edith Wharton), writings about the Brooklyn Bridge (Whitman, Hart Crane), writings by expatriates (Jose Marti, Federico Garcia Lorca), and the work produced by the Harlem Renaissance, the Beats, Black Arts Movement, the New York School of Poets, the Nuyorican Poets Café, and recent avant-garde writers. We will also look at visual art from the Armory Show, Abstract Expressionists, Minimalists, Pop artists, “graffiti artists” and current artists (e.g., graphic novelists such as Adrian Tomine). We will think about the effects of AIDS, immigration, 9/11, money, etc. on the production of cultural artifacts.