New Semester
I’ve begun teaching a writing class on “the city” and a senior seminar on “work.” Here are the reading requirements for the two courses:
City:
Mike Davis’s book on L.A. entitled City of Quartz, Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul, a World War Two memoir A Woman in Berlin by an anonymous female journalist, and Suketu Mehta’s book on Bombay called Maximum City. Other texts: Vivian Gornick on how to write about New York City in Approaching Eye Level; a chapter from Pankaj Mishra’s Butter Chicken in Ludhiana, a book of travels through small towns; Hanif Kureishi’s “Bradford,” an account of a visit to the “city of knives”; war-reportage by Joan Didion from San Salvador and Susan Sontag from Sarajevo; Lisa Brawley on the boomtown that is Guantanamo. Also W.G. Sebald, Edmund Wilson, Jonathan Raban, Walter Benjamin, and Michel de Certeau.
Work:
Charles Dickens, Hard Times; John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Studs Terkel, Working; Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickle and Dimed; Sam Selvon, Lonely Londoners; Hari Kunzru, Transmission; and Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living. In addition, we will read and discuss the following texts that will be distributed in class: George Saunders, “CivilWarLand in Bad Decline” and “Christmas,” essays by David Sedaris and Richard Rodriguez, excerpts from Andrew Ross’s Fast Boat to China, John Berger’s, A Seventh Man, and Isabel Hilton’s report, “Made in China.” I will also put on library reserve Michael Moore’s “Roger and Me” and Stephen Frears’ “Dirty Pretty Things.”
Work: A Confederacy of Dunces as an anti-work diatribe? Just a thought…
And since you are including films for City, it occured to me that Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Paromita Vora’s Q2P would also be good films to include.
Comment by Space Bar — February 2, 2007 @ 8:13 am
Great list… Any room for a segment from Calvino’s Invisible Cities in the “city” course?
Comment by rage — February 2, 2007 @ 11:49 am
What a fantabulous list! I’d hop on upstate and take both classes, if it didn’t involve…well…leaving the city.
I envy your students (my only worry is that, in having too much too read, they might risk not reading deeply enough).
Comment by Teju — February 2, 2007 @ 2:30 pm
How about Adam Gopnik’s Paris to the Moon, for the cities?
Comment by Neale — February 4, 2007 @ 4:23 pm
I’d like to see ‘Taste of Cherry’ discussed in the City course as its final text. Times, schools, students change: upon the setting semester, will we see a brief piece on your changing classroom pedagogy since your steamroller days in florida?
Comment by mordenti — May 3, 2007 @ 4:39 pm