Reading NYC: A Century in Fiction

This course tours the great history of a great metropolis through the reading of three novels that represent different times and places in New York City, while exploring the real streets, landmarks, and communities that shaped them. First, we will visit the Fifth Avenue mansions of the late nineteenth-century Gilded Age through Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth. Next, we will participate in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s through Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem. Finally, we will cross the Brooklyn Bridge and think about gentrification in the late twentieth century through Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. Along the way, we will discuss the evolution of the American novel and the intersections of class, gender, and racial experiences in urban life. These visits throughout New York will connect literature to lived experience, bringing the city’s fictional worlds into dialogue with the vibrant, changing city outside the classroom.