HUMA 5300, a required core course, is an introduction to the interdisciplinary Graduate Program in the Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas. It provides an overview and a set of selected, specific explorations into the domains of human studies embraced by the program, as well as an introduction to the organization, requirements, and interdisciplinary goals and foundations of this program. This semester this section of the course takes on--epistemologically, discursively, and metaphorically--the rich notions of "reading" and "writing": as alternative and variable modes of understanding and of creating, and the challenges of expression and communication on either or both sides of that seminal coupling. To ground our collective inquiry, we take the example of "the city," past, present, and future. With that common base, we cross the various disciplines that contribute to the program. Our perspective, however, focuses more on different modes of interdisciplinary inquiry, understanding, and expression than on comparisons and contrasts among traditional disciplines. For this purpose, "the city"--which presses so heavily for so long on the human spirit--is especially fruitful soil for artists, composers, and performers as for feminist scholars, inter- disciplinary historians, and students of culture(s).

Requirements:
1. Attendance, preparation, and participation in seminar discussions
2. Presentation of one or more oral reports on either or both required readings or supplementary reading, raising issues and posing discussion questions
3. Analytic review essay due at mid-semester (5 pages)
4. Research proposal including literature search, bibliography, and statement of study problem, questions, and approaches

Books for purchase:
William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, eds., Visions of the Modern City (Johns Hopkins UP, 1987)

Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision (Kentucky, 1975; Johns Hopkins, 1991)

William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York City (Oxford UP, 1992)

Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England [1845] (Academy Chicago ed., 1984)

Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (Columbia, 1993)

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Harcourt Brace, 1974 [1972]), trans. William Weaver

Other readings will be available at McDermott Library.

Optional:
"City and Suburb," special issue, American Quarterly, 37, 3 (Bibliographic Issue, 1985) or
Howard Gillette and Zane L. Miller, eds., American Urban History: A Historiographical Review (Greenwood Press, 1987)

Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), chs. 1-2

Daniel Greenstein, A Historian's Guide to Computing (Oxford, 1994)

*Library reserve reading
 

WEEK 2 Reading the City in Ideas and Images
Thomas Bender, Toward an Urban Vision (Kentucky, 1975; Johns Hopkins, 1991)

REPORTS/OPTIONAL:
*John J. McDermott, "Nature Nostalgia and the City: An American Dilemma" in his The Culture of Experience (New York Univ. Press, 1976), 179-231;

*Warren Susman, "The City in American Culture," in his Culture as History (Pantheon, 1984), 237-251;

*Leo Marx, "The Puzzle of Antiurbanism in Classic American Literature," in Cities of the Mind: Images and Themes of the City in the Social Sciences, eds. Lloyd Rodwin and Robert Hollister (Plenum, 1984), 163-180.

James L. Machor, Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (Wisconsin, 1987)

Rodwin and Hollister, eds., Cities of the Mind

Sharpe and Wallock, eds., Visions

WEEK 3 Walking in the City
Select at least 5 from:
*Sam Bass Warner Jr., "Slums and Skyscrapers: Urban Images, Symbols, and Ideology," in Cities of the Mind, ed. Rodwin and Hollister, 181-194

*Betsy Blackmar, "Re-Walking the Walking City: Housing and Property Relations in New York City, 1780-1840," Radical History Review, 21 (1979), 131-151

*Penelope J. Corfield, "Walking the City Streets: The Urban Odyssey in Eighteenth-Century England," Journal of Urban History, 16 (1990), 132-174

William R. Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham: Culture and Commerce in New York City (Oxford UP, 1992), chs. 1-2

*Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (California, 1984), Ch. VII "Walking in the City," 91-110

Deborah Epstein Nord, "The Social Explorer as Anthropologist," in Visions, ed. Sharpe and Wallock, 122-134

REPORTS/OPTIONAL:
Roy Rosenzweig and Elizabeth Blackmar, The Park and the People: A History of Central Park (Cornell, 1992)

John Merriman, The Margins of City Life: Explorations in the French Urban Frontier, 1815-1851 (Oxford, 1991)

Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground (MIT, 1990)

Vanessa Schwartz, "The Morgue and the Musee Grevin: Understanding the Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siecle Paris," Yale Journal of Criticism, 7 (1994), 151-173

Elizabeth Wilson, "The Rhetoric of Urban Space," New Left Review, 209 (1995), 146-160

WEEK 4 Library Research and Reference
There are a variety of guidebooks and handbooks on research approaches and methods and reference materials. They date from Henry Graff and Jacques Barzun, The Modern Researcher forward. None of them is perfect; many offer various attractions. Familiarize yourself with several by locating and browsing the appropriate sections of the Library and good bookstores. Familiarizing yourself with the University of Chicago Manual of Style or the MLA Handbook will also benefit you.

WEEK 5 Seeing is Believing? City Texts and Pretexts, Transformations and Translations
Frederick Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England [1845], 1892 English edition (Academy Chicago ed., 1984), Introduction by E.J. Hobsbawm, and chs. on "The Great Towns" and "The Results."

*E.J. Hobsbawn, "History and the Dark Satanic Mills," in his Labouring Men (Anchor Books, 1967), 123-140

*W.O. Henderson and W. Chaloner, "Introduction," to Engels, The Condition (1958 Blackwell and Stanford UP editions), ix-xxix

*Ira Katznelson, Marxism and the City (Oxford, 1992), ch. 4, 141-156

*Steven Marcus, "Reading the Illegible," in The Victorian City, ed. H.J. Dyos and Michael Wolff (Routledge, 1973), vol. I:257-276 (also his "Reading the Illegible: Modern Representations of Urban Experience," in Visions, ed. Sharpe and Wallock, 232-256)

REPORTS/OPTIONAL: see also later weeks, and
Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, "Reading City Streets," French Review, 61 (1988), 386-397

Martha Banta, "The Three New Yorks: Topographical Narratives and Cultural Texts," American Literary History, 7 (1995), 28-54

Steven Marcus, Manchester, Engels, and the Working Class (Random House, 1974)

Carl Smith, Urban Disorder and the Shape of Belief: The Great Chicago Fire, the Haymarket Bomb, and the Model Town of Pullman (Chicago, 1995)

Grady Clay, Close Up: How to Read the American City (Chicago, 1980)

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT, 1960)

WEEK 6 Urban Places, Gendered Spaces
Select at least 5 from:
*Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1992), chs. 1-2

*Dina Copelman, "The Gendered Metropolis: Fin-de-siecle London," Radical History Review, 60 (1994) 38-56

*Sarah Deutsch, "Reconceiving the City: Women, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1910," Gender and History, 6 (1994), 202-223

*Susan Porter Benson, "Palace of Consumption and Machine for Selling: The American Department Store, 1850-1940," Radical History Review, 21 (1979), 199-221

*William Leach, "Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores, 1890-1925," Journal of American History, 71 (1984), 319-342

*Elizabeth Wilson, "The Invisible Flaneur," New Left Review, no. 191 (1992), 90-110

*Hazel V. Carby, "Policing the Black Woman's Body in an Urban Culture," Critical Inquiry 18 (1992), 738-755

REPORTS/OPTIONAL:
Janet Wolff, "The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity," Theory, Culture and Society, 2 (1985), 37-46

Elizabeth Wilson, The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women (California 1992)

Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight

Mary Ryan, "Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth-Century America," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (MIT Press, 1992), 259-288, and her Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Johns Hopkins, 1990)

Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Temple UP, 1986)

Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving (Oxford, 1989)

Susan Porter Benson, Counter Culture (Illinois, 1986)

Susan Merrill Squier, ed., Women Writers and the City: Essays in Feminist Literary Criticism (Tennessee, 1984)

Valerie Steele, Paris Fashion: A Cultural History (Oxford, 1988)

WEEK 7 Electronic Research
Here, too, there are a multitude of books, magazines, guides, and the like. No one claims all our attention. Browse in library and bookstores. A new hopeful sign is the Oxford University Press series, Guides to Computing for the Humanities, of which one, Daniel Greenstein, A Historian's Guide to Computing (1994), has appeared.

FIRST ASSIGNMENT: Critical Review Essays due (See Appendix )

WEEK 8 Reading and Writing the City: Facts or Fictions?
Carla Cappetti, Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (Columbia, 1993)

Taylor, In Pursuit of Gotham, ch. 5

REPORTS/OPTIONAL: see previous weeks, and
Nord, "Social Explorer," in Visions, ed. Sharpe and Wallock

Michael Cowan, "Walkers in the Streets: American Writers and the Modern City," Prospects, 6 (1981), 281-311

Carl Smith, Chicago and the American Literary Imagination (Chicago, 1984) and his Urban Disorder (Chicago, 1995)

Charles Scruggs, Sweet Home: Invisible Cities in the Afro-American Novel (Johns Hopkins, 1993)

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford, 1973)

Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Blackwell, 1992)

Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson, Paris as Revolution: Writing the 19th-Century City (California, 1994)

J. Gerald Kennedy, Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (Yale, 1993)

Andrew Lees, The City Perceived (Columbia, 1985)

Machor, Pastoral Cities
 

WEEK 9 Writing the City: Fictions or Facts?
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (Harcourt Brace, 1974 [1972]), trans. William Weaver

*William Gass, "Invisible Cities," Architecture and Literature, via 8(1986) 137-155

*Richard Lehan, "Urban Signs and Urban Literature: Literary Form and Historical Process," New Literary History,18 (1986), 99-113

*Joseph W. Childers, "Observations and Representation: Mr. Chadwick Writes the Poor," Victorian Studies, 37 (1994), 405-432

REPORTS/OPTIONAL: see previous weeks, and

Peter Preston and Paul Simpson-Houseley, eds., Writing the City: Eden, Babylon, and the New Jerusalem (Routledge, 1994)

M. Gottdiener and Alexandros Ph. Lagopoulos, eds., The City and and the Sign: An Introduction to Urban Semiotics (Columbia, 1986)

William Sharpe, Unreal Cities: Urban Figuration in Wordworth, Baudelaire, Whitman, Eliot, and Williams (Johns Hopkins, 1990)

Philip Collins, "Dickens and the City," 101-121, and Paul Anderer, "Tokyo and the . . ." 220-231, in Visions, ed. Sharpe and Wallock

Squiers, ed., Women Writers

Richard Maxwell, The Mysteries of Paris and London (Virigina, 1992)

Adrian Rifkin, Street Noises: Parisian Pleasures, 1900-1940 (Manchester, 1993)
 

WEEK 10 Cities as Works of Art? Painting the Town Red?
Richard Haas's urban paintings

Select from:
*Donald J. Olsen, "The City as a Work of Art," in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (Edward Arnold, 1983), 264-285

*Ada Louise Huxtable, "Inventing American Reality," New York Review, 3 Dec. 1992, 24-29

Taylor, In Pursuit, chs. 1-4

*Alex Potts, "Picturing the Modern Metropolis: Images of London in the Nineteenth Century," History Workshop, 26 (1988) 28-56

*Caroline Arscott and Griselda Pollock, "The Partial View: The Visual Representation of the Early Nineteenth-Century Industrial City," in The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class, ed. Janet Wolff and John Seed (Manchester, 1988), 191-233

*John Tagg, "The Discontinuous City: Picturing and the Discursive Field," in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretation, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (University Press of New England, 1994), 83-103

*Alexander Gelley, "City Texts: Representation, Semiology, Urbanism," in Politics, Theory, and Contemporary Culture, ed. Mark Poster (Columbia, 1993), 237-260

Select other essays on arts of/in the city from:
Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis, 1890-1940 (Chicago, 1984)
Sharpe and Wallock, ed., Visions
William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square (Russell Sage, 1991)
Leonard Wallock, ed., New York: Culture Capital of the World, 1940-1965 (Rizzoli, 1988)

REPORTS/OPTIONAL:
Donald Olsen, The City as a Work of Art: London, Paris, Vienna (Yale UP, 1986)

Daniel Bluestone, Constructing Chicago (Yale, 1991)

Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978 (Yale, 1979)

Theda Shapiro, "The Metropolis in the Visual Arts," among other essays in Metropolis, 1890-1940 (Chicago 1984), ed. A. Sutcliffe, 95-128

Theodore Reff, "Manet and the Paris of Haussmann and Baudelaire," 135-167; Michele Hannoosh, "Painters of Modern Life: Baudelaire and the Impressionists," 168-189, in Visions, ed. Sharpe and Wallock

T. J. Clark, The Painter of Modern Life (Knopf 1984, Princeton, 1986)

Dallas Museum of Art, The Impressionist and the City (1992)

Robert Herbert on French Impressionism

Molly Nesbit, Atget's Seven Albums (Yale, 1992)

Wolff and Seed, eds., The Culture of Capital

Grady Clay, Close Up: How to Read the American City

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City
 

WEEK 11 Cities in Performance, Cities as Performance
Film: Metropolis (1927)

*Deborah Epstein Nord, "The City as Theater: From Georgian to Early Victorian London," Victorian Studies, 31 (1988) 159-188

*John Kasson, "Civility and Rudeness: Urban Etiquette and the Bourgeois Social Order in Nineteenth-Century America," Prospects, 9 (1984), 143-167

*Susan Davis, "Popular Uses of Space in Philadelphia, 1800-1850," Critical Communications Review, 3 (1983), 3-23

Select other essays on arts of/in the city from:
Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis, 1890-1940 (Chicago, 1984)
Sharpe and Wallock, ed., Visions
William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square (Russell Sage, 1991)
Leonard Wallock, ed., New York: Culture Capital of the World, 1940-1965 (Rizzoli, 1988)

REPORTS/OPTIONAL:
Denise Lawrence, "Parades, Politics, and Competing Urban Images," Urban Anthropology, 11 (1982), 155-176

John Kasson, Rudeness and Civility (Hill & Wang, 1990)

_____, Amusing the Million (Hill and Wang, 1978)

Karen Haltunen, Confidence Men, Painted Women (Yale 1982)

Susan Davis, Parades and Power (Temple, 1986)

Robert Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York, 1880-1930 (Oxford, 1990)

Lewis Ehrenberg, Steppin' Out (Greenwood, 1981)
 

WEEK 12 Cities in Motion, City Sounds, Cities on the Stage and Screen
Film(s): The City (1939)

*Anthony Sutcliffe, "The Metropolis in the Cinema," 147-172,

*David Harold Cox and Michael Naslas, "The Metropolis in Music," 173-190, in Metropolis, ed. Sutcliffe

Select other essays on arts of/in the city from:
Anthony Sutcliffe, ed., Metropolis, 1890-1940 (Chicago, 1984)
Sharpe and Wallock, ed., Visions
William R. Taylor, ed., Inventing Times Square (Russell Sage, 1991)
Leonard Wallock, ed., New York: Culture Capital of the World, 1940-1965 (Rizzoli, 1988)

REPORTS/OPTIONAL:
Leonard Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Harvard, 1988)

William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (Pantheon, 1993)

Larry May, Screening Out the Past (Oxford, 1981)

Charlie Gillett, The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll (Pantheon, 1983)

Elaine Brody, Paris: The Musical Kaleidoscope, 1870-1925 (Braziller, 1987)

Popular music, movies, good, bad and ugly!
 

WEEK 13 Drafting proposals: no class meeting
 

WEEK 14 The Future of the City/The Death of the City?
Film: Style Wars

As time allows, read:
*Joan Didion, "New York: Sentimental Journeys," New York Review, 17 Jan. 1991, 45-56

*William Gass, "The Face of the City," Harpers, March, 1986, 37-46

*William Sharpe and Leonard Wallock, "Bold New City or Built-Up 'Burb? Redefining Contemporary Suburbia," with responses and reply, American Quarterly, 46 (1994), 1-61

Research proposals due at class time.