This course explores the city as a theme in such literary genres as the novel, drama, autobiography, and poetry, as well as film. From the ancient polis as a political unit to the twenty-first century metropolis, the city has emerged in literature as the antithesis to state of nature, the birthplace of modernity, the stage for social change and conflict, the locus of transition from empire to nation-state, and the meeting point of "the East" and "the West." With its inclusions, exclusions, periphery, subcultures, underground, public and private spheres, and fragmentations, the city is a symbolic system exploited widely in literature. The course may include such literary representations of the city as Balzac or Baudelaire's Paris, Joyce's Dublin, and Mahfouz's Cairo, as well as contemporary, utopian or dystopian works in world literature.
