In 1980 I
was offered a rare opportunity and a pedagogical challenge: the department I had recently joined at San
Francisco State University asked me to prepare to teach a semester-long (15
weeks) course “on” New York City. It
would become part of a group of courses
constructed around this unifying theme:
a city is a specific, cultural artifact,
and the study of a selected city (in a humanities context) helps serve
one of the educational missions of a large state university, namely to
introduce
humanities texts and scholarship to undergraduates who, because of the ever growing number of required courses in their major, might take only two or, at the most, three upper-division liberal arts courses. A decade earlier, the university had been San Francisco State College, academic home to beats, hippies, black power, Asian-American, la raza, and Native-American activists. Now, the once small college had become a state university, part of the twenty-three campus California State University system.
humanities texts and scholarship to undergraduates who, because of the ever growing number of required courses in their major, might take only two or, at the most, three upper-division liberal arts courses. A decade earlier, the university had been San Francisco State College, academic home to beats, hippies, black power, Asian-American, la raza, and Native-American activists. Now, the once small college had become a state university, part of the twenty-three campus California State University system.
I was a
brand new hire in the Humanities Department, an academic entity in the College
of Humanities alongside Philosophy, Classics, English, Foreign Languages,
Creative Writing, and Journalism. The
department had first offered a course on a city, Jerusalem, in 1972. A course on San Francisco came next, in 1973
(five years later “San Francisco” was a multi-section course—seven—and the
second highest enrolled course on campus, behind “Human Sexuality”). A new course concentrating on New York
City—mine to develop—would be the first on a list of new cities: soon Los Angeles, Paris, London, Beijing,
Mexico City, and Rome were to be added.
The new cities, plus Jerusalem and San Francisco, would be listed in the
university catalogue as, “(city name): Biography of the City.” Creating and teaching the “biography” of New
York was my part. O.K., “I’ll take Manhattan/the Bronx and Staten Island too.”
I determined
my New York would be about art, gender, ethnicity, architecture, politics,
literature, the outer boroughs, and New Jersey too. Since a semester was only 15 weeks long, my
selection of texts would be, I hoped, sources for discussions of a range of
“big ideas.” History, philosophy,
theory, and analysis were as much the subject as was New York, a hell of an
idea for “a helluva town.” In the
fifteen weeks were included a 60 minute in-class midterm and a three hour
in-class final exam (classes were either a once a week, 3 hour meeting or two
weekly, 1.5 hour meetings). A “book
review essay” (8-10 pages) was the other piece of required work to be handed in on final exam day. The selection of the novel to be reviewed had
to be declared no later than midterm day.
The constraint the semester time frame imposed was daunting: what follows is a description of my attempt
to make it work so as to arrive at the best “learning outcome[s]” for the
thirty-five students who were on the official enrollment sheet when I turned in
final grades.
At the
campus bookstore I ordered copies of Bayrd Still, Mirror for Gotham, and
assigned the students appropriate selections from Mirror. I also assigned selections from readings
I had put together. Here the university
was helpful and obtained copyright permissions.
Eventually, all readings and visuals were accessible on line. I decided to use Walt Whitman’s accounts of
the colonial history of Long Island (Brooklyn and Queens) and his essay on the
New York harbor, British prison ships during the Revolution. Whitman remained a featured presence during
the first half of the semester. His
columns from the New York Aurora (1842) and Life Illustrated (1856)
were assigned during weeks when late English colonial, Federal, and early
Victorian New York were class topics.
Nearing midterm exam (week 7), the first great infrastructure projects
were under examination, but I decided that the Croton Water System and the Erie
Canal needed time and attention before
the midterm. I put off Crystal Palace
and “Greensward” until week eight.
In the
second part of the semester a primary concern was examining New York as a site
of American literary production: there
was a lot to select from, and I decided to feature Whitman’s New York poems,
“Broadway Pageant,” “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun,” and Stephen Crane’s Bowery Tales (“Men in the Storm,” “An Experiment in Misery,” and Maggie, A Girl of the Streets). This also was the part of the term where the
two films I had selected best fit course objectives, Ken Burns’s “Brooklyn
Bridge” and D. W. Griffith’s “Musketeers of Pig Alley.” Class discussions, in-class screenings, and
slide shows all needed time, and Boss Tweed and Greater New York still had to
be considered! This first time, teaching
New York’s biography was becoming an exercise in the art of reduction. During our study of literary New York I had
intended that the class read Henry James (selections from The American Scene)
and Theodore Dreiser (Color of a Great City): ultimately I only could keep James’s chapters
on Central Park. I was learning I did
not have “world enough or time.” By the
time we had worked our way to Crane, Griffith, and Jacob Riis’s “other half”
there was only four weeks left.
This is how the experimental phase of
the course ( i.e., the first time taught phase) concluded: “Contract One” of IRT construction; the Grand
Central Terminal, and Pennsylvania Railroad Station—the representative
artifacts of urban infrastructure; New York realist painters and photographers
brought together—visual documents of city life; and James VanDerZee and Leroi Jones-selected sources on Harlem in the twentieth century.
 |
| Photographer James VanDerZee, 1886-1983 |
The department administrator
conducted a written student evaluation in week eleven; thirty students were in
class. From a personal perspective (tenure
track assistant professor) the reviews were good: all the students said they had an
understanding of certain specifics of place, New York, and a greater
appreciation of the national, global, and intellectual space it occupies. And almost all said the syllabus was too
ambitious. These were not lazy or
disinterested undergraduates, but they were telling me I had taken too big a
bite of the apple. And, over the next
years, a more manageable (and teachable) biography of New York did emerge. (See syllabus below.) I taught the course
at least one semester a year until my retirement in 2008, and I do think the
course did provide an intellectual environment for students to examine the core
of urban life and to do good American Studies work.
After the tragedy of 9/11, I began
the first class meeting of every semester with events of that terrible day and
its aftermath--always discussing the current conditions at the site. It wasn’t long after 9/11 when I noticed that
there was a good deal of shared conversation about the state of the city. Over the years many of the students had
actually traveled to New York by the time they were enrolled in the class, and
we talked about a city that was changing and constantly reshaping itself; I
explained why terms I used in “teaching” them New York, words like “uptown,”
“downtown,” and “A and D trains” were fast becoming archaic. Years later, after that first semester, I
heard from students who had moved “back east,” and found themselves living in
New York. They were still “using” the
course and finding their own way in New York.
To my pleasant surprise, some even had read Color of a Great City.
Syllabus
Professor Rodger Birt
New York: The
Biography of a City
Humanities 375 is a Segment III Course: Dynamics of the City
Fall Semester, 2006
Required Texts:
Eric
Homberger, Historical Atlas of New York City (HA)
Stephen
Crane, Maggie, A Girl of the Streets
http://humanities.sfsu.edu/litebox password:
hum123
http://eres.sfsu.edu-“Readings on
Line” (OL) password: TBD
Recommended Text:
Street Map
of New York City
Required written work for all enrolled students:
1. One
Mid-Term Quiz (11-6-06)
2. One
Final Examination (12-18-06)
Both Mid-Term and Final will be
based on a critical analysis of readings, class lectures and discussions, and
slide and film viewings.
3. A
Book Review Essay 9-10 pages – This essay is Required of ALL
students. One of the following novels
is to be selected for this essay. (only).
Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie Pietro
di Donato, Christ in Concrete
Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence E. L.
Doctorow, The Waterworks
Jack Finney, Time and Again Mark Helprin, Winter’s
Tale
Stephen Millhauser, Martin Dressler Michael
Gold, Jews Without Money
William Dean Howells, A Hazard of New Fortunes Caleb Carr, The Alienist
Peter Quinn, Banished Children of Eve Caleb Carr, Angel
of Darkness
Gordon Parks, Shannon Michael
Pye, The Drowning Room
Beverly Swerling, City of Dreams John
Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer
Kevin Baker, Paradise Alley Henry James, Washington
Square
SCHEDULE OF CLASS MEETINGS and TOPICS
8/28 Introduction
9/11 The
Contemporary City (New York 9-11-01 to 9-11-06)
9/18 The
Modern City (New York after World War I)
Reading: HA, 176-177
9/25 Colonial
New York (Part One – New Amsterdam)
Reading: (OL) Henry Christman, ed., Walt Whitman’s
New York and HA, 10-33 and 166-171
10/2 Colonial
New York (Part Two – British New York)
Reading: (OL) Continue in Walt Whitman’s New York
and HA, 34-59
10/9 The
Emerging Metropolis: New York, 1790-1860
Reading: HA, 60-81
10/16 The
Emerging Metropolis: New York, 1790-1860
Reading: (OL) Walt Whitman of the New York Aurora
and New York Dissected; HA, 84-87
10/23 The
Writer’s New York (Walt Whitman’s New York)
Beginnings
of the Urban Infrastructure (The Croton Water System and Crystal Palace)
Reading: HA, 82-83
10/30 New
York at Mid-century (A Victorian City)
Reading: HA, 88-100
11/6 Beginnings
of the Urban Infrastructure (Central Park)
Reading: “The New York Central Park”
MID-TERM
Missed Midterm Policy –
NO MAKE UP TEST
11/13 Beginnings
of the Urban Infrastructure (Brooklyn Bridge)
Reading: HA, 100-127
11/27 The
Emerging Metropolis: Stress in the
Social Fabric (the Emergence of the Political Boss – William M. Tweed and
Tammany Hall.) “So, what are you going
to do about it?” – Thomas Nast and the Political Cartoon.
Reading: Stephen Crane, Maggie, a Girl of the
Streets, and “An Experiment in Misery.”
12/4 Stephen Crane, Coney Island and
the birth of Popular Culture. Beaux Arts
City. The new infrastructure/Penn
Station and Grand Central Terminal; PAPERS DUE
12/11 Envisioning the City (Jacob Riis
and the “Other Half,”) D.W. Griffith:
“Musketeers of Pig Alley.”
12/18 FINAL EXAM
Office Hours: TBD
Office: HUM 532
Telephone: 415/338-7412
Email: rbirt@sfsu.edu
Statutory Statement – Segment III – HUM 375
To receive
Segment III credit for this course, students must complete the cluster as
described in the Class Schedule
or Bulletin, including the requirement that they must have earned 60 units by the end of the semester in
which they take the course.
All Segment III
courses are required to include a minimum of 10 pages of writing, with a
concern for content,
style and grammar, corrected by the instructor.
Course Content—
This course is
an examination of the place New York City holds in American culture
studies. We will study the
architecture, art, literature, and history of the city and the key figures of
metropolitan life.
Course objectives/Learning outcomes—
Knowledge of the
city’s history from its colonial beginnings to the early twenty first century;
Knowledge of the
contributions made to American culture by the city’s writers, visual artists,
and other public figures;
Knowledge of the
city’s built environment;
Ability to
“read” humanistic artifacts and write about their social and cultural
significance.
Plagiarism Notice—
Plagiarism occurs when a student misrepresents the work of
another as his or her own. Plagiarism
may consist of using the ideas, sentences, paragraphs, or the
whole text of another without appropriate acknowledgement, but it also includes
employing or allowing another person to write or substantially alter work that
a student then submits as his or her own.
Any assignment found to be plagiarized will be given an “F” grade. All instances of plagiarism in the College of
Humanities will be reported to the Dean of the College, and may be reported to
the University Judicial Affairs Officer for further action. (Quotation taken from “College of Humanities
Plagiarism Resources”)
Bulletin Description—
Intellectual, artistic, and social
life of New York City.
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