Since the 19th century, the city has been both a privileged and a problematic object of representation for narrative realism: privileged because urban spaces have increasingly been seen as shaping or producing the very social relations and individual experiences that realism wants to describe; problematic because the city itself, as a coherent totality that might explain those relations and experiences, is too vast, heterogeneous, and complex to be represented through the traditional techniques of realism.
This course will approach the problems and possibilities of the city for realism through a close reading of two large, ambitious texts that attempt to represent the city as a totality: James Joyce's novel ULYSSES (1922) and David Simon's television series THE WIRE (2002-2008). We will be particularly concerned with two techniques, pioneered by Joyce, for representing the city: stream of consciousness, which creates a tour of the city from the perspective of a single, mobile flâneur; and montage, which creates a map of the city by juxtaposing various cross-sections of social life or various institutions central to the city's functioning. |