This course will introduce a variety of methodological approaches to American culture and literature, derived from literary and cultural studies, history, sociology, and political theory. Taking up these different disciplinary perspectives, we will ask what “American culture” has to do with politics and policy making. Our task will be to investigate this presumed relation between “culture” and “politics” by examining a specific concern of both American culture and political regulation in the 20th century: the American city. In other words, we will start with three specific questions: how has “the city” been represented in literary and scholarly work? What role have these different representations played in the formation of American politics? Finally, what theoretical and methodological perspectives provide us with useful ways of responding to these questions?

In the process, we will investigate a canonical selection of literary and theoretical representations of the city which have been central to conceptualizing the experience of urban life in America. The course will start with a historical look at the anxieties and promises of new urban life in the early 20th century and its relation to political struggles and arguments over immigration restriction and racial segregation. Towards the latter part of the quarter, we will take up some of the methods and historical perspectives we’ve studied in order to examine how new “neoliberal” models of urban governance have attained policy-making legitimacy by relying on a variety of narratives prominent today in American culture, and how these narratives have been contested by alternative representations of the city. Our goal will be to engage in critical debates about how key policy “issues” affecting us today, such as crime, welfare, globalization, gentrification, prisons, and residential segregation, are related to, struggled over, and made sense of within what we have come to call “American culture.”

Texts:

• F. Scott Fitzgerald. "The Great Gatsby".
• Nella Larsen. "Passing".
• Chester Himes. "If He Hollers Let Him Go".
• Paul Auster. "City of Glass".
• Samuel Delaney. "Times Square Red Times Square Blue" "The Neoliberal City".
• Jason Hackworth. "The Neoliberal City".