"He doesn't know, he can't say, before the facts, and he doesn't even want to know or to say; the facts themselves loom, before the understanding, in too large a mass for a mere mouthful: it is as if the syllables were too numerous to make a legible word. The illegible word, accordingly, the great inscrutable answer to questions, hangs in the vast American sky, to his imagination, as something fantastic and abracadabrant, belonging to no known language, and it is under this convenient ensign that he travels and considers and contemplates…."
—Henry James, "The Effect of the Infusion," from The American Scene
His way ain't so tough 'n he can't speak form above mm . . .
'n' wid proper rational understandin' …
—Louis Zukofsky, "A foin lass bodders," after Pound's translation of GuidoCavalcanti's 13th-century "Donna mi prega"
This course will sound the limits, permissions, and implosion of realist strains in American experimental literature through a genealogy of writing surrounding Lower Manhattan—an area defined by the contrast between federal and financial power on the one hand, and the evolution of the US's densest immigrant neighborhood into a countercultural (now turning boutique-city) mecca on the other. Reading through the objectives of both tourists and inhabitants, we will consider texts as inventors, not merely representations, of urban textures. We will begin and end in the zone's—and the global future's—epicenter of power, on Wall Street, in order to grasp the stakes of its inversion by the underground and to sound the reciprocal interference of work and leisure, fortune and emiseration within the metropolis. We will then turn to the (Lower) East Side—a magnet for millions of workers, black and white, and for Irish, German, Italian, Chinese, and Jewish immigrants over the 19th and early 20th centuries. In reading the neighborhoods surrounding the Bowery, we will ponder Henry James's sense of the illegibility of the American amalgamation witnessed downtown: "something fantastic and abracadabrant, belonging to no known language." We will then ask what new languages and forms were enabled by the tenement environment's compression of ethnic and linguistic traditions—taking Louis Zukofsky's polylingual lyrics and homophonic translations as a key example. We will move from modernist strains of the Lower East Side's depiction through an explosion of post-war artistic activity in the neighborhood, asking how its unparalleled collision of Englishes may be linked to experiments in orality and literacy typical of the New York School or the polylingual, performance, sound, and spoken word poetry of arenas such as the St Mark's Poetry Project and the Nuyorican Poets Café. We may close with questions surrounding this region's transmogrification following the devastation of September 11 and/or the breakneck gentrification of Soho and the Lower East Side.
Literature treated may include: Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"; Walt Whitman, selected poems; Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives; Stephen Crane, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets; Henry James, The American Scene; John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer; Louis Zukofsky, selected poems & prose; Ron Padgett, Bernadette Mayer, & Joe Brainard, writings and collaborations; Jackson Mac Low, The Pronouns and "simultaneities"; Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo; Edwin Torres, All-Union Day of the Shock Worker; Richard Serra, Tilted Arc; Various artists, anonymous, Here is New York; projects for the World Trade Center memorial. One presentation to the seminar leading to a final research project will be required.