The City as Medium (Inquiry Seminar)
New York University
COURSE DESCRIPTION
A century ago architects conceived of a spire atop the future Empire State Building as a giant mooring mast. Dirigibles would tie up to it. Passengers would descend with their suitcases and disappear into the great metropolis below. Buffeting winds rendered that plan impractical, and the spire was quickly repurposed as a radio beacon, not a magnet but a transmitter. Then came King Kong.
A city can be many things at once: a labyrinth, a stage, a vector for communicable disease, a crucible of conflict and new ideas, an agglomeration of structures, both durable and mythic… At bottom, though, it is the place where strangers meet.
As we emerge from our silos and begin to reinvent public life, this seminar will examine the city as a text, a platform and a medium in its own right. We’ll focus on New York and—barring another lockdown—students will be required to venture out, interact with and document the messiness of urban life. We’ll also look briefly at other cities around the world, Paris, Mumbai… We’ll explore what it means to move through a city using GPS and data analytics, to meet over Zoom, mate via Tinder and feed on Yelp and GrubHub. Finally, we’ll consider whether, like the builders of the Empire State Building, we may be misreading what our city is, is becoming and is ultimately for.
LEARNING OUTCOMES
This is an inquiry seminar, designed to foster curiosity, discussion, the crafting and refinement of interesting questions and the development of imaginative strategies for finding answers. Of each text we examine, whether it’s a scholarly essay, a photograph or a homeless encampment, we will ask: What is the argument here? Who’s making it? Where are they located—not just philosophically, but physically? How do they establish their authority? What kinds of evidence do they marshal? Where did they get it—what did they have to actually do to find and assemble it? And most important of all, what burning question is that argument an attempt to address? Throughout the semester students will cultivate their own burning questions about cities and their own place within them. Ultimately, you will come away from this course more observant of urban life in all its complexity, with a heightened awareness of the symbolic processes going on all around you and a broader conception of what constitutes a platform or medium.
READINGS
Spectacle/City as Stage
Course Syllabus
E.B. White, “Here Is New York” in Philip Lopate, ed., Writing New York: A Literary Anthology. New York: Library of America, 1998. pp. 693-711
Marshal Berman, “Falling” in Matthew Beaumont & Gregory Dart, eds., Restless Cities. London: Verso, 2010. pp. 123-137
art spiegelman, “Ephemera vs. the Apocalypse.” Lecture, Cooper Union, 10 Sep. 2004. Excerpted in Indy Magazine, Autumn 2004.
Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures & Snares of Old New York. New York: Vintage Departures, 1992. pp. 121-125
Electric Light/Public Amusements
Ralph Ellison, “Prologue.” in Invisible Man. New York: Vintage International, 1995. pp. 3-14.
Scott McQuire, “Electropolis.” Ch. 5 in The Media City: Media, Architecture and Urban Space. London: Sage Publications, 2008. pp. 113-129.
Elizabeth Ewen, “City Lights: Immigrant Women & the Rise of the Movies.” In Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society, Vol. 5, No. 3, supplement. “Women and the American City,” 1980. pp. S45-S66.
Friedrich A. Kittler & Matthew Griffin, “The City Is a Medium.” New Literary History, Vol. 27, No. 4, Literature, Media, and the Law (Autumn,1996), pp. 717-729
Signs: Reading the City
David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York. New York: Columbia UP, 1998. Chapter 3, “Commercial Impudence and the Dictatorship of the Perpendicular: Signs of the City.”
Roland Barthes, “Semiology and Urbanism.” In The Semiotic Challenge. New York: Hill & Wang, 1988. pp. 191-201.
Robert Hanley, “Debating the Language of Signs: New Jersey Towns Tell Asian-Owned Stores: Advertise in English, Too.” New York Times, April 9, 1996, p. B1.
Chang-rae Lee, “Mute in an English-Only World.” New York Times, April 18, 1996, p. A23.
Structures
Robert Caro, “The City Shaper.” The New Yorker, Jan. 5, 1998. pp. 38-55.
Kevin Lynch, “The Image of the City and Its Elements.” Ch. 3 in The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1960. pp. 46-83.
Juan Flores, “‘Salvación Casita’: Space, Performance, and Community.” Ch. 4 in From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity. New York: Columbia UP, 2000. pp. 63-77.
Schlepping: Walkers in the City
Virginia Woolf, “Street Haunting” (1927). In The Essays of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 4, ed. Andrew McNeillie and Stuart N. Clarke, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986.
Michel de Certeau, “Walking in the City.” Ch. 7 in The Practice of Everyday Life . Berkeley: U of California Press, 2011. pp. 91-110
Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis & Mental Life.” Ch. 4 in The Sociology of Georg Simmel.
Craig Taylor, “Frank Senior, Singer” in New Yorkers: A City and Its People in Our Time. New York: Norton, 2021. Pp. 2-5.
Social Media: The Tree of Cracow
Robert Darnton, “An Early Information Society: News and Media in 18th-Century Paris.” American Historical Review, Feb. 2000. pp. 1-35
David Paul Nord, “Readership as Citizenship in 18th-Century Philadelphia.” Ch. 9 in Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers, Urbana IL: U of Illinois Press, 2001. pp. 199-224.
O’Henry, “The Last Leaf.”
Surveillance: Eyes on the Street
Jane Jacobs, “The Uses of Sidewalks: Safety.” Ch. 2 in The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House, 1960. pp. 29-54
Edgar Allen Poe, “The Man of the Crowd.” In The Complete Short Stories, MysteriousPress.com, 2014. pp. 1467-1483
Sophie Calle, Suite Vénicienne. Los Angeles: sigilio, 2015. Excerpts.
Scavengers: Ragpickers, Palimpsests & the Presence of the Past
Katharine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. New York: Random House, 2012. Excerpts.
Jean Giradoux, The Madwoman of Chailot. New York: Hill & Wang, 1954. Excerpts.
Ben Katchor, Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer, Stories. Boston: Little Brown, 1996. Excerpts.
Slumming
Richard Sennett, “Fear of Touching: The Jewish Ghetto in Renaissance Venice.” Ch. 7 in Flesh & Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization. New York: Norton, 1994. pp. 212-254.
Katharine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity. New York: Random House, 2012. Excerpts.
Seth Koven, “Slumming Defined” in Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2004.
Struggle: Whose Streets?
The Flushing Remonstrance, 1657
Sarah Schulman, Let the Record Show: A Political History of Act Up. New York: MacMillan, 2021. Excerpts
Evan Friss, “Critical Mass.” in On Bicycles : A 200-Year History of Cycling in New York City. New York: Columbia UP, 2019.