What is a New Yorker?: A Social History of the City Through its Literary Protagonists

Abstract

“What is a New Yorker?: A Social History of the City Through its Literary Protagonists” engages with New York City as a mutable, productive site of inquiry for the formation of spatial identity. At the same time, it defines New York as a space where lived experience, material realities, and urban imaginaries intersect. This project maps a specific New York imaginary formed by the intersections of the city’s literary protagonists and foundational historical moments in the 20th and 21st centuries; moments that irrevocably altered New York as space and lived experience and prompted the city’s residents and scholars to consider what a New Yorker’s relationship to the city is. Thus, it investigates how New Yorkers understand themselves to be New Yorkers, and it does so by analyzing how the city’s novelists craft literary New York protagonists and their experiences in and of the city.Central to this project is the notion that the city and its inhabitants are both products of constant forces of change, and that a novelistic exploration of how to move within the city must necessarily reflect on how the city evolves with every historical change. In my chapters, I read four essential New York novels alongside four of the city’s distinct, formative historical moments across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I also read these texts against a larger corpus of novels that help historicize each genre—historical fiction, the detective novel, the novel of immigration, and the disaster narrative. Each has a rich genealogy that I outline, against which I examine the experimental nature of my four primary novels. Thus, my project demonstrates how these texts propose new paradigms for representing the city in their genre and ultimately influence how the city itself is perceived. In other words, the novels both represent and produce modes of living in the city. Finally, I also review four contemporary museum exhibits in New York that are in conversation with the themes and questions of each chapter. These reflective interludes add a further historical dimension to the project by engaging with the city’s archives and exploring how the city presents itself to its inhabitants. Together, the project’s chapters and interludes thus show how New York is not merely a narrative setting, but an actively constructed and materially experienced condition; and being a New Yorker is not a stable identity but must be continually reinvented and renegotiated.