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Today, toward the end of a section meeting that I was visiting for the Writing New York course, I had a thought: What would Henry James’s Washington Square look like as seen through the lens of trauma studies? Dr. Sloper might emerge as a victim of both personal and cultural trauma. The personal trauma is the death of his wife in childbirth, which leaves him a cold, detached man who erects barriers of irony to protect himself from the world around him and produces, in his daughter Catherine, another traumatized subject. The cultural trauma might be the waves of immigration into the lower parts of Manhattan that push men like Dr. Sloper further and further uptown. Not to mention the history of the Square itself, with its hanging tree and its paupers’ graves.

I think I’ll suggest this to Bryan Waterman as a way of approaching James’s novel when we write about it for the cultural history of New York City on which we are collaborating.

[The picture above shows NYU's neo-gothic Main Building on the west side of the square ca. 1850. It was demolished in 1894. For a Washington Square timeline, see this post over at PWHNY.]

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February 10, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

J-Term 2011

Starting next year, NYU will have a J-Term — a January term — that lasts three weeks (January 4 to 20). Our spring term will begin on the first Monday — rather than the first Tuesday — after the Martin Luther King holiday. These courses are meant to be intensive and immersive, cramming fourteen weeks’ worth of instruction into thirteen days. Most of these courses will feature significant co-curricular activities.

For the 2011 J-Term, I’ve been asked to teach an NYU Abu Dhabi course on “New York and Modernity.” I’ll be teaching it here in New York, and the NYUAD students who elect to take it will be flown in from Abu Dhabi. There will be a few spaces for NYUNY students as well.

I’ve recommended that the NYUAD students be issued NYUAD-branded down jackets! I imagine that the biggest adjustment for some of them will be the weather rather than the jet lag. When I was in Abu Dhabi at the end of January, it was a lovely 75 degrees Farenheit during the day, 59 at night with a cool breeze. The weather in New York over the same period hovered around a high of 17.

The course I’m developing is an adaptation of a course I taught last year as a Freshman Seminar. Here’s the current description:

Modernism was a broad movement in literature, arts, music and architecture that flourished first in Europe and then the United States between from the turn into the twentieth century until just after the Second World War. This course will examine the ways in which New Yorkers reshaped European modernism and created a distinctive legacy that marks the city to this day. We will explore the reciprocal relationship between modernism and the city, investigating how modernism was shaped by urban experience and how, in turn, modernism helped to mold our conception of the modern city. We will investigate the parallels and contrasts among a variety of forms including literature, film, art, music, and architecture, stressing the uneven developments of the period, with special attention paid to the tension between highbrow and lowbrow forms. Coursework will be supplemented with film showings and outings that will include concerts, plays, museum trips, and walking tours. One of the goals of the course will be to see our investigation of New York’s relationship to modernism as a case study in the relationship between urban culture and modernity more generally. Students will develop a set of conceptual tools that will enable them to analyze modern urban life not only in New York but in other cities around the globe, from London to Abu Dhabi to Shanghai.

I imagine meeting for about three hours each morning, with afternoon activities Sunday through Thursday and nighttime activities on Friday and Saturday. Among the books that I’m contemplating for the syllabus are New York Modern: The Arts and the City by William Scott and Peter Rutkoff; the volume that I’ve just edited with Bryan Waterman, The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of New York; and Alex Ross’s wonderful account of twentieth-century classical music, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. There will be trips to MOMA, the Whitney, the Met, and the Guggenheim. Nighttime outings will probably include the Metropolitan Opera, the Philharmonic, and plays, hopefully one one off-Broadway and one on. I’m hoping there will be something by Eugene O’Neill playing that month.

If anyone has any suggestions for texts or activities that might be appropriate for the course, I’d love to hear them.

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January 28, 2010 by Cyrus Patell

Manic Monday

And not “just another” manic Monday. In fact, I can’t remember another day on which I’ve had to give three big public performances — and on different subjects to boot (though in my mind there are significant areas of overlap among them).

9:30 a.m. — First up, a Writing New York lecture on on E. B. White’s Here is New York, introducing the week’s theme of “History, Modernity, and Nostalgia.” In fact, the interplay among these three ideas will turn out to be a major area of exploration as the course unfolds, and Monday’s lecture serves as a kind of second overture for the course after the introductory lecture last week. I’ve described the lecture over at Patell and Waterman’s History of New York, and I did last year, I introduced the discussion by telling an anecdote about Hillary Rodham Clinton invocation of White’s book during her debate with Rick Lazio during the 2000 campaign for the U.S. Senate seat from New York.

2:00 p.m. — American Literature I, Lecture Two. Luckily, this lecture belongs to my comfort zone, because I decided this year to frame the course with Moby-Dick. So this lecture was an introduction to Melville’s life and writing and the opening sections of Moby-Dick. The students had been asked to read the “Etymology” and “Extracts” sections that open the book and the land chapters (1-22) to get their feet wet as it were. Lecturing about Moby-Dick has become a little bit like playing in my band used to be back in the day: I look forward to certain solos and riffs, but also to varying them in event.

6:30 p.m. — A panel on “Multiculturalism or Cosmopolitanism” for the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute as part of a year-long series on “The Cosmopolitan Idea.” Sharing the stage with two of your intellectual heroes – this case the intellectual historian David Hollinger (UC Berkeley) and the cultural critic Walter Benn Michaels (University of Illinois at Chicago) is bound to be a little bit … disconcerting. The two of them, in their different ways, hover over my recent work on emergent literatures in a kind of good cop-bad cop routine. (Guess which is which.) I offered a preview of the event PWHNY over the weekend, and later this week I’ll write about each of their talks individually (and maybe my own). Some video excerpts will eventually appear on the NYU Abu Dhabi Institute website. (You can see the entire first session in the series there now.)

Needless to say, my brain felt more than a little bruised come Tuesday morning.