2024 Fall

ENGLISH 190 004 - SEM 004

Research Seminar

American Urbanism in Literature and Film: New York to California

Balthazar I Beckett

Aug 28, 2024 - Dec 13, 2024

Mo, We

05:00 pm - 06:29 pm

Wheeler 300

Class #:16330

Units: 4

Instruction Mode: In-Person Instruction

Offered through English

Current Enrollment

Total Open Seats: 0

Enrolled: 17

Waitlisted: 0

Capacity: 17

Waitlist Max: 0

Open Reserved Seats:0

Hours & Workload

9 hours of outside work hours per week, and 3 hours of student-instructor coverage of course materials per week.

Other classes by Balthazar I Beckett

Research-oriented and designed for upper-division English majors. Intensive examination of critical approaches, literary theory, or a special topic in literary and cultural studies. Topics vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's "Announcement of Classes" for offerings well before the beginning of the semester.

Class Description

The American city is a complex and dynamic organism—and the subject of a great body of literature (both fiction and non-fiction) and film. Focusing on New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, this course will trace and critically engage how American urban development has been depicted on the page and on screen from the early twentieth century to today. We will follow how writers and filmmakers have addressed the dramatic changes that American urban spaces underwent from the progressive era, turn-of-the-century segregation and the Great Migration to redlining, white flight, and suburbanization in the wake of the New Deal. This course asks students to write critically about urban development from the battles over “urban renewal” and the anti-eviction campaigns of the Civil Rights era to the impact of 1970s neoliberal policies, the “war on drugs” and militarized “broken windows” policing, and the urban uprisings of the early 1990s. We will end this semester by studying how writers address the impact that hyper-gentrification and climate chaos (from disaster capitalism to grassroots organizing) have on American cities today. Over the course of this semester, students will submit two shorter essays and a longer, 15-page, final research paper in which they will partake in scholarly debates that they feel passionate about.

Class Notes

Course Materials

· Marshall, Paule. Brown Girl, Brownstones. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2009 [1959].

ISBN-13: 978-0486468327.

· Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. New York: Vintage, 2000 [1961].

ISBN-13: 978-0375708442.

· Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Del Rey, 1996 [1968].

ISBN-13: 978-0345404473.

· Revoyr, Nina. Southland. New York: Akashic Books, 2003.

ISBN-13: 978-1888451412.

· Lethem, Jonathan. The Fortress of Solitude. New York: Vintage, 2004 [2003].

ISBN-13: 978-0375724886.

· Ruiz-Grossman, Sarah. A Fire So Wild. New York: Harper, 2024.

ISBN: 978-0063305427.

Any edition of the above-listed books will do. Selections from other fictional and non-fictional texts will be made available online. These will include texts by Maya Angelou, Piri Thomas, James Baldwin, Marshall Berman, Mike Davis, Jane Jacobs, Dawn Bohulano Mabalon, Lelsie Kern, Teju Cole, Jodi Melamed, Peter Moskowitz, Suleiman Osman, Nayan Shah, Rebecca Solnit, John Edgar Wideman, and Craig Wilder.

Films include Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Martin Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, Carlos López Estrada’s Blindspotting, and Joe Talbot’s The Last Black Man in San Francisco, among others. show less