LECTURE TEN
THE RISE OF THE CITY
URBANIZATION
• From a rural nation to an urbanized nation
• Westward Movement: urban movement,
leads to new cities, San Francisco, Denver
• New cities grow along the Transcontinental
Railroad, Los Angeles in the 1980s
• Urbanization in the South: Durham: tobacco
production, Birmingham: iron making,
Houston: cattle, oil industry
FACTORS PROMOTING THE RISE OF
THE CITY
• American Industrial Revolution—
concentration of industry
• Transportation: rise of mass transport
• Elevator, streetcar, automobile
• Immigration
• Cast iron structures
THE PALACE OF THE CONSUMER
• Shopping and buying become communal acts
• Alexander Turney Stewart: founder of first
dept. store
• Cast iron framing: James Bogardus: exploits
the advantages of new technology: lightness,
adaptability, strength, openness
• Other factors: glass, elevator
THE DEPARTMENT STORE
• Democratization of luxury—Zola
• Any person can be a buyer
• Fixed price policy instead of haggling, or seller
and buyer agreeing on price
• Customer joins a nationwide consumption
community
THE CLOTHING REVOLUTION
• Ferenc Pulszky: in New York no characteristic
costumes mark the grades in society (1852)
• The invention of the sewing machine:war of the
sewing machines: Elias Howe Jr. and Isaac Singer
• Ready made clothing becomes popular
• Previously only slaves and sailors wore ready
made clothing
• New Immigrants: many of them were tailors
• Ready made clothing Americanized the immigrant
THE CIVIL WAR’S IMPACT ON
CLOTHING
• Antebellum period: trade in cast-off, second
hand clothing
• Demands for uniforms—standardization
• Demand for shoes (earlier: straights, no
difference between left and right foot, now:
crooked ones)
THE CITY AS A TEXT
• A gathering of meanings interpreted by
people who create their own stories, histories
• Barthes: the city is constructed as a text,
inscription of man in space
• Reading a city: from high to low: skycraper to
street level, uptown to ghetto, rich or poor
• A chain of meanings with competition with
each other
MANHATTAN SKYLINE
COMPETING VERSIONS OF THE CITY
• 1630: City upon a hill—John Winthrop
• Heavenly city, orderly and godly because the
eyes of the world are looking on
• John Bunyan: passing through Vanity Fair
(corruption and disorder) to reach the
Celestial City
• Thomas Jefferson: cities are pestilential to the
moral,health, and liberties of men
THE CITY AS A THREAT
• Encourages vice, sin, and indulgence
• Undermines the Jeffersonian Republic based on
virtuous farmers
• Josiah Strong: Our Country (1885) City is a nerve
center, but also a storm center full of menace,
sway of Mammon, luxuries gathered—ennui of
surfeit, desperation of starvation, social
dynamite: robberts thieves, foreigners, wage
workers, multiplying and focalizing the elements
of anarchy and destruction
POSITIVE VIEWS OF THE CITY
• Walt Whitman: organic bodies, a simple,
compact, well-join’d scheme
• Celebration of the city: Crossing Brooklyn
Ferry
• William James: center of the cyclone,
dynamic, forward looking, with a
transformative potential
THE THEORETICAL CITY
• Frederick Howe: Society is an organism like a
human body, city is the head, heart, and
center of the nervous system
• A text created by people who impose their
vision of order on the wilderness to create a
contained and disciplined environment
• An old knot of contrariety (Whitman), a place
of competing discourses
MICHEL de CERTEAU
• Social theorist, theorist of the city (Walking in
the City)
• New York City is an ever-changing space/text,
that invents itself from hour to hour
• Reading the city is by walking, a
multidimensional text
• The most immoderate of human texts
MICHEL de CERTEAU
• On top of skyscrapers: man becomes a voyeur,
an Icarus,a solar Eye
• Walking in the city: bodies are following an
urban text
• Creation of a manifold story with neither
author or spectator
OPERATION OF THE CITY
• A utopian and urbanistic discourse:
• Produces its own space: via rational
organization, city planning
• Creation of a universal and anonymous
subject: the city itself
THE CITY IN LITERATURE
• Poe: The Man in the Crowd: the undivulged
city, like a crime mystery can be understod
and solved
• Dreiser: Sister Carrie, the city as a persuasive
light,: the promise of the night: the street, the
lamp, the lighted chamber set for
dining…these are mine in the night
BRIGHT LIGHTS, BIG CITY
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Jay McInerney, 1984
Influenced by Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer
City is a dialogue, a republic of voices
City is a collage where texts interact with
other texts
• Foucault: heterotopia: juxtaposing several
spaces which are incompatible within one
place-salad bowl, ethnic communities living
side by side
LECTURE 11 THE CULTURE OF YOUTH
• Youth is a conjuction point for numerous
discourses including race, class, power,
gender, and sexuality
• Youth as a crossroad
• Historical formation of the country is
connected with youth
• Young, vigorous, unique, on the cutting edge
of history
PERCEPTIONS OF THE NEW WORLD
• A place of renewal
• Rebirth
• Enegy of childhood and youthfulness
represents a chance to begin again
• To undo the corruptions of the Old World
• The American Revolution as an Oedipal
Revolution—the rebellion of the child against
the parent
PERCEPTIONS OF THE NEW WORLD
• America as a Good Bad Boy—Leslie Fiedler
• Crude, unruly, but knows what is right
• A side of sanctioned rebellion—Judith
Fetterley
• Youth is incorporated in the whole society, a
constant challenge to the adult—parent
culture
VISIBLE YOUTH CULTURE
• 1955: Blackboard Jungle—Richard Brooks
• 1955: Rebel without a Cause—James Dean,
Natalie Wood
• Challenge to father figure
• 1985 The Breakfast Club-John Hughes
• Challenge to school, society
CONTAINING YOUTH
• The house as a metaphor for adult-parental space
• An established, solid, economic territory
containing youth, reminding of its constant
subordinate position
• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off—cutting school, yet
returning to parent’s house
• House is sedentary, lifeless, banal v. desire to
move away, motion
• Surveillance, control, normalizing power of adult
society
THE HOUSE
• Douglas Copeland—Generation X
• When someone tells you they’ve just bought a
house, they might as well tell you they no
longer have a personality….they are locked
into jobs they hate….they are broke….they no
longer listen to new ideas… What few happy
moments they possess are those gleaned from
dreams of upgrading
THE HOUSE AS A PANOPTICON
(Foucault)
• One group holds power over others and
transforms them into subjects
• A circumscribed world of surveillance—a
guard at the centre of the circle, whom the
prisoners cannot see, all acts come under
regulation and inspection
• By transforming humans into subjects,
objectification takes place as well—the
formation of the Other
PANOPTICON
YOUTH TEXTS
• Tom Sawyer (1898)—Tom after some rebellion
accepts the position of the Other
• Between pull of the outside and the
restrictions of the comforting controls finds a
compromise solution
--He does not transgress into the seductive
outside
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951)
• The ultimate youth novel
• A vision of alienation in the post-war world of
conformity
• Holden Caulfield—rejecting the phoney adult
world
• Rebellion against the school whose mission is
to mould young boys into splendid , clear
thinking young men
THE CATCHER IN THE RYE (1951)
• Holden insists on sincerity, decency, honesty
• Transgressing adult codes because they
believe it to be false, desire for lost values
• Lost values of the past are represented by
dead brother Allie, or younger sister Phoebe
• The role of the Imaginary—pre-Oedipal phase,
undivided, coterminous with the mother,
untroubled by the crises of sexuality—Jacques
Lacan
THE SPACES OF SELF-CREATION
• Struggle of youngsters to find spaces for
individual or group expression outside the adult
mainstream
• Learning from oppressed communities
• Authoring the self: to articulate means to order
the world, to exercise power over and control
aspects of reality
• Rock music—hybridization of the oppressed
culture’s musical traditions: blues, jazz, country
music
YOUTH MUSIC
• A living discourse, a countervoice to alienated
society
• Dancing—losing oneself to beat and motion,
opening up a social space outside public and
private boundaries
• Roll over Beethoven—Chuck Berry
• Rock as a protest
YOUTH AT THE EDGE
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Donna Gaines: Teenage Wasteland (1992)
A study of dead-end kids in suburbia
Claiming authority over the self via expression
Breat Easton Ellis Less Than Zero—Gloom
rules, the world is shrinking, a desire to
disappear,
GENERATION X
• Rejection of a manufactured history
• Rising on the debris of post-modern society
• Existing with the attitude of irony, playfulness
among advertising, TV, muzak, McJobs (parttime non-career jobs)
LECTURE 12 THE SPREAD OF FREEDOM
• Inaugural address of George W. Bush, 2001
• We have a place, all of us in a long story, a
story we continue, but whose end we will
neve see. It is the story of a new world that
became friend and liberator of the old, the
story of a power that went into the world to
protect but not to possess, to defend, but not
to conquer
REALPOLITIK V. MORALITY
• Von Clausevitz: war is a continuation of
diplomacy with other means
• Establishment of spheres of interest, the
importance of national interest
• Idealistic approach: to make the world safer
for democracy, to fight a war to end all wars
THE REDEEMER NATION
• George Bush’s second inauguration address:
• American is a nation with a mission, we have
no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire
• This great republic will lead the cause of
freedom
• American exceptionalism
• Mission concept
THE REDEEMER NATION
• Following 9-11 a new manifestation, and
reaffirmed commitment to the notion of the
redeemer nation
• Forerunners: John Winthrop, city upon a hill
(1630)
• Thomas Paine: We have it in our power to begin
the world all over again (Common Sense 1776)
• 1839: John L. Sullivan: America had a blessed
mission to the nations of the world… to smite
unto death the tyranny of kings
THE REDEEMER NATION
• Woodrow Wilson: in World War One right was more
precious than peace, American soldiers were crusaders
proving the might of justice and right
• Lyndon B. Johnson: American wants nothing for itself in
Vietnam, only fights for the right of South Vietnamese
to guiding their own country in their own way
• War in Iraq: to defend liberty and justice because these
principles are right and true for all people
• War in Afghanistan: to protect and advance women’s
rights
CULTURAL SUPERIORITY
• Expansionist policies are justified on the
ground of superior cultural values (AngloSaxon superiority, Christianity, democracy)
• Racial arguments, Anglo-Saxon race
• Defeat and dispossession of Native Americans
• White Man’s Burden—brother’s keeper
• Nineteenth century attitudes reappear in the
twentieth century
IMPERIAL DISCOURSE
• World War Two: dehumanization of Japanese,
racial slurs
• Vietnam War: enemy: Indians, jungle: Indian
Country
• Iraq War: Abu Ghraib prison abuses
AMERICA AS A MODEL
• An assumption that the American pattern of
development has a universal application
• Although America was born as a result of a
revolution, not all revolutions were accepted by
the U.S.
• Russian Revolution of 1917
• Allan Bloom: World War Two: an educational
project to force American values and model on
nations who would not do so—occupation of
Germany and Japan
THE CHANGING CONCEPT OF
FREEDOM
• A fluid concept
• Henry Luce: founder of TIME, LIFE, FORTUNE
magazines
• Born of missionary parents in China
• February, 1941 editorial in LIFE, The American
Century
• U.S. should join Britain in war against Germany
• U.S. should replace Britain as a world leader
• American principles should be applied globally
THE AMERICAN CENTURY
• February, 1941 editorial in LIFE, The American
Century
• U.S. should join Britain in war against
Germany
• U.S. should replace Britain as a world leader
• American principles should be applied globally
• U.S. has right and moral obligation to use its
military and economic power to promote
democracy and freedom
THE FOUR FREEDOMS
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Freedom from want
Freedom from fear
Freedom of speech
Freedom of worship
FDR: the twentieth century is the century of
the common man, January 6, 1941 address to
Congress
THE FOUR FREEDOMS
NEW STRATEGIES after 9-11
• Pre-emption: deterrence is not sufficient to
guarantee the security of the U.S.
• Either you are with us or with the terrorists
• A right accepted under international law to
take action against a state about to attack
• Prevention: taking action against a state that
might be a threat in the future
• A unilateral exercise in American power, a proactive doctrine instead of containment