The writer Paul Auster said that New York is the most American of cities, a living embodiment of the values and virtues that America was founded on: diversity, tolerance, and equality under law. Despite its often antagonistic relationship with the rest of the country, New York City, he claimed, is the nation's true heartland. Do you agree? This course will determine its own definition of New York, by exploring it through its stories. Students experience New York City through a literary lens (with several films and TV shows included). We roam through textual neighborhoods, including Wall Street, the Lower East Side and East Village, Greenwich Village, the Upper East Side, and Harlem, even crossing bridges into Brooklyn and Queens. The course considers the role of immigrants in the formation of New York; battles between gangs, police, and politicians; the bohemian community and the Beat subculture; the idea of Central Park; and the glory of the Harlem Renaissance. We read Walt Whitman, Herman Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, John Dos Passos' Manhattan Transfer, Henry Roth's Call it Sleep, Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn, Diane di Prima's Memoirs of a Beatnik, Tama Janowitz's Slaves of New York, Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, and Toni Morrison's Jazz, Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho, and Jenny Zhang's Sour Heart. We consider representations of the city in movies and TV: Saturday Night Fever, The Warriors, Midnight Cowboy, Rosemary’s Baby, Manhattan, Seinfeld, When Harry Met Sally, Sex and the City, and more.