Kommentar |
”New York is a diamond iceberg floating in river water,” Truman Capote once said about this famous city. In this seminar we will track the ”diamond iceberg” across American literary history and study some of the literary traditions and stylistic means that have shaped the depiction of New York in literature. In doing so, we will mostly focus on three novels that each in their own way tell the city: John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer (1925), hailed by many as a modernist masterpiece, Paul Auster’s City of Glass (1985), which, as part of his New York Trilogy is an interesting text to study in the framework of postmodernism, and Open City (2011), a contemporary novel about New York by Teju Cole that offers a multilayered portrait of the city. |
Literatur |
Please purchase a copy of the following books. Additional texts will be provided. John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer (ISBN 9780141184487) Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (ISBN 9780571276653) Teju Cole, Open City (ISBN 9780571279432) |