English/American Studies 186
Tales of Three Cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles
Judith Richardson
Class meets: TTh 1:15-3:05, Bldg. 310-107
Office hours: TBD
E-mail: judithr@stanford.edu
Office phone: 723-2724
This course explores the ways in which urban form and experience shape literary texts, and how
literary texts participate in the creation of urban place and society, by looking at the literature of
three American cities in paradigmatic moments: New York in the mid-nineteenth century;
Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; and Los Angeles in the mid- to late
twentieth century.
Schedule
1/7
Introduction
1/9
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Prelude
Edgar Allan Poe “The Man of the Crowd” (handout)
Peter Brooks, “The Text of the City” (handout)
Raymond Williams, “The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism” (handout)
Weeks 2-4: New York
1/14
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Letters from New York
Lydia Maria Child, Letters from New York, selections (handout)
Hans Bergmann, God in the Street, parts of chaps. 1 and 2 (on CourseWork)
David Henkin, City Reading, Chap. 2 (on CourseWork)
1/16
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The Inside Dope
George Foster, New York by Gaslight, and Other Urban Sketches, selected sketches
1/21
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Sex (and Death) and the City
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (handout)
Amy Srebnick, selections from The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers (CourseWork)
Christine Stansell, selection from City of Women, (CourseWork)
1/23
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Singing the Body Urban
Walt Whitman, selected poems and prose (handout)
1/28
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Working Up
Horatio Alger, Ragged Dick
Henkin, City Reading, parts of chaps. 3 and 6 (CourseWork)
2
1/30
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Preferring Not To
Herman Melville, “Bartleby” (handout)
Weeks 5-7: Chicago
2/4
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The Build-Up
Henry Claridge, “Chicago: ‘The Classical Center of American Materialism”
(CourseWork)
Donald Miller, chapter from City of the Century (CourseWork)
Henry Fuller, opening of The Cliff Dwellers (handout)
Louis Sullivan, selected writings (handout)
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Making a Chicago Idiom/Aesthetic
H. L. Mencken, “The Literary Capital of the United States”(handout)
Carl Sandburg, selected poems (handout)
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2/6
2/11-13: The Girl Comes to the Big City
 Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
2/18-20: How the Other Half Lives
 Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
Weeks 8-10: Los Angeles
2/25-27: Dream land
 David Fine, Imagining Los Angeles, chap. 1 (CourseWork)
 Reyner Banham, chapter 6 of The Architecture of Four Ecologies (CourseWork)
 Nathaniel West, The Day of the Locust
3/4-7 The Naked City
 Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep
 Robert Towne, Roman Polanski, Chinatown (screening date and time TBA)
3/11-13: Walls and Mosaics
 Anna Deavere Smith, Twilight, Los Angeles, 1992
 Edward W. Soja. “Los Angeles, 1965-1992: From Crisis-Generated Restructuring to
Restructuring Generated Crisis,” from The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the
End of the Twentieth Century (CourseWork)
Requirements
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Midterm essay, 5-6 pages, due Monday, February 17th
Final essay, 8-10 pages, due Thursday, March 20th
Attendance and active participation in class discussions
3
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Focus points: By 10 p.m. on the evening before each class (thus Monday and
Wednesday evenings), please e-mail me a brief comment or question of no more 150
words regarding some passage or aspect of the reading you would like to discuss in class.
These comments will not be formally graded, but will make up part of your participation
grade.
Learning Outcomes
Students should be able to:
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Recognize how American cities took shape within particular social, economic, and
technological contexts, and understand how the rise of particular cities both reflected and
affected historical and cultural changes;
To trace how the form as well as the conceptualization of “the city” in American culture
differs and develops over geographical space and historical time;
Recognize how representational and aesthetic innovations—new genres, techniques, and
themes—developed in response to particular urban experiences and challenges;
Understand the dynamic roles that various kinds of texts played in mapping or constructing
urban space and society;
Use literary texts to explore social issues within urban settings, including issues of issues of
race, class, ethnicity, and gender;
Put literary and historical documents into conversation, to understand both the social work
done by literary texts and the literary nature of historical or journalistic accounts.