What is it like to live in a city? Jonathan Raban says that “living in cities is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style to describe the peculiar relationship between man and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living.” This course will be about the “arts” of urban living, both as literature depicts it and as we as inhabitants experience it. We will consider the city from two perspectives. First, we will read a variety of literary texts that emerge from the modern city. These will be stories about the new meanings produced by the city (Frank O’Hara’s poems), the new forms of the urban novel (Paul Auster’s City of Glass), and the new ways that people interact there (LeRoi Jones’s The Dutchman and Nella Larson’s Passing). These narratives and poems will be accompanied by readings about the city’s rise and its manifold meanings: Jane Jacobs on the sidewalk, Michel de Certeau on walking in the city, etc. The second aspect of the course will be the students’ own negotiations with the city. In a series of experiential assignments, students will be asked to “read” places and their movements within the urban spaces as corollary to their understanding of the literary texts.