The Writer in New York
A Freshman Seminar
FRSEM-UA.001 2015 [Tentative]
[Day/Time TBA]
[Building/Room TBA]
Instructor:
Vince Passaro
e-mail: vp35@nyu.edu
917 669 6224
DRAFT SYLLABUS (May 1, 2015)
Course Overview:
This seminar is meant to introduce students to an understanding of their adopted city that is
based on their own new experiences and on what they are reading of others’ experiences in
the past – which is to say, the course requires the students both to read about how other
writers have understood New York and to go out and experience it and write about it
themselves. We examine the romantic idea and the real history of writers who have lived in
and written about New York City. We also study the city itself, learning to see it as these
writers have seen it, less as a home than as a super-literary event, a means of enlarging our
imaginations and tuning our powers of observation. Through discussion of the readings, and
brief encounters with related musical, visual arts, and other resources, we try to understand
the New York writer’s particular forms of misery and joy. We also make unique use of the
University’s rich resources, such as the Fales Library’s renowned collection of materials on
the Downtown New York writers of the 1970s and 1980s.
Goals:
For students to begin to have a sense of the rich literary history of New York; and, more
importantly for them to come to recognize the issue of sensibility in literature (as well as in
other arts), by exploring how their own sensibilities react to the unusual circumstances of
living in New York and writing about that experience. To assist, we will read from among
the multitude of writers who have seen their own sensibilities, at least in part, be formed by
the city. Using in-class internet resources we will sample from the music, visual arts,
photography or film of the periods we’re investigating, because all of these are integral to an
understanding of how the artistic consciousness reacts to the city within the framework of a
particular cultural moment, its styles and prejudices.
Requirements:
Students keep a journal, write in it daily or almost daily, and each week hand in typed
versions of that week’s journal work. The instructor writes extensive comments in response.
Additionally, the course requires a final 5-page paper in which the student writes about a
particular place within the five boroughs or a highly specific aspect of New York life: this
final project can be fiction, non-fiction, multi-media, graphic, or, in consultation with the
instructor, can involve other forms and genres. The journals too can wander across genres,
can include creative work, visual material, etc. Please consult with me before embarking on
something extravagantly off the norm.
Grades:
Students receive grades in the middle of the semester, on their final papers, and at the end of
the semester. The journals are not graded: the difference between perfunctory or superficial
work versus real engagement and effort will be obvious both to the student AND the
instructor and the instructor’s comments will make this issue clear as well. Grades are based
on the following: 1. the quality of students’ engagement in class discussion (not everyone
feels inclined to speak, but if called upon, should at least know the work and understand the
topic under discussion and be willing to venture a thought or reaction) [10 percent]; 2
evidence of increasing effort in their journal keeping and their observations, which can
be judged by the instructors’ written responses [65 percent]; and 3. on the quality of their
final projects [25 percent].
Schedule of work:
(Dates are subject to change based on course meeting times)
Week 1: Introduction: What is a New York Writer?
Discussion of a number of writers to be read in the course. Emphasis on Greenwhich
Village, the East Village, the Lower East Side, and NYU’s Downtown Collection. Brief
introduction with readings from New York writers early and late. Reading: Didion, Joan,
“On Keeping a Notebook” and “Goodbye to All That.” (plus in-class internet resources)
Texts to be purchased or otherwise obtained by the students are in italic bold type.
Weeks 2-3 The Last Outsider:
David Wojnarowicz Waterfront Journals and Close to the Knives. Wojnarowicz, of whom
nearly all students have not heard, is a paradigmatic writer in this course, the writer we will
look to again and again as a measure of the intensity, expressed in literary terms, of the New
York experience.
Selections (short) from Melville, Whitman and Crane provided by the instructor.
Weeks 4-5 High and Low: Writers in the 20s
Portraits of Artists as Young Men and Young Women:
West, Nathanael, Miss Lonelyhearts
Selections from Edna St. Vincent Millay
Selections from Fitzgerald, F. Scott, the New York party in The Great Gatsby.
Parker, Dorothy, selections from prose and poetry.
Discussion of the literary milieux of The American Mercury and The New Yorker
Harlem Renaissance
Selections from: The Norton Anthology of African American Literature
Zora Neale Hurston
Langston Hughes
Claude McCay
Jean Toomer
Richard Wright
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Weeks 6-7
Politics, Survival and the Intellectual: The 30s and 40s
The Partisan Review, The New Republic, The New Yorker
McCarthy, Mary, selections from Intellectual Memoirs
McCarthy, Mary, from The Company She Keeps: “Cruel and Barbarous Treatment”,
“Portrait of the Intellectual as a Yale Man”, “The Genial Host” and “The Man in the Brooks
Brothers Shirt”
Wilson, Edmund, selections from The Thirties (journals)
Ellison, Ralph, from Invisible Man opening section
Dawn Powell, selections from the journals and fiction
White, E.B., “This is New York”
Mitchell, Joseph, selected short pieces
Weeks 8-9
Coffee, Cigarettes, Booze, Sex, Art, and the Smell of Revolution: the 50s and 60s
The New York School:
Poems by Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch
Discussion of the The New York School (in-class internet resources).
The Beats:
Burroughs, William, selections from Word Virus: the William S. Burroughs Reader
Ginsberg, Allen, poems from Howl and historical context (in-class internet resources)
Protestants, Jews, and Blacks:
Baldwin, James, Another Country
Mailer, Norman, An American Dream
Paley, Grace, selections from The Collected Stories
Baldwin, James, selections from Nobody Knows My Name
Weeks 10-12
High and Low Revisited: Downtown in the 70s and 80s
Material from The Downtown Collection:
revisiting David Wojnarowicz, prose, images, photographs (Close to the Knives, Waterfront
Journals). Selections from Keith Haring’s Journals
Hell, Richard, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp
Smith, Patti Just Kids
Ellis, Bret, American Psycho
Frisch, Max, Montauk (provided by instructor)
Selections and minor texts from Kathy Acker, Lynn Tillman, Catherine Texier, Mike Topp
Sante, Luc, “My Lost City”
Sante, Luc “The Thompkins Square Park Riot, 1988”
Moore, Lorrie, “How to Be An Other Woman”.
Weeks 13-14
What Ever Happened to Writers: New York as Memory in the 90s and After
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Frisch, Montauk, continued.
DeLillo, Don Cosmopolis
Lerner, Ben, 10:04
MacDonald, Dwight: “Masscult and Midcult” (essay)
Wilson, Edmund, “Thoughts on Being Bibliographed” (essay)
Selections from mrbellersneighborhood.com
Selections from Aloud!: Voices from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe
Diaz, Junot, “The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (story)
Katchor, Ben, Julius Knipl, Real-Estate Photographer
Required Texts
Wojnarowicz, David, Waterfront Journals and Close to the Knives
West, Nathanael, Miss Lonelyhearts
McCarthy, Mary, The Company She Keeps
Burroughs, William, Word Virus: the William S. Burroughs Reader
Mailer, Norman, An American Dream
Baldwin, James, Another Country
Smith, Patti, Just Kids
Hell, Richard, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp
Ellis, Bret Easton, American Psycho
DeLillo, Don, Cosmopolis
Lerner, Ben, 10:04
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