This is a zero-cost textbook course, which means students don’t have to pay for any of the materials. Everything we read this semester will be available here, for free. Texts are organized by course unit because, well, it’s easier that way.

UNIT 1: “THE NEW COLOSSUS”
City of Immigrants

Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus”
Tato Laviera, “lady liberty”
Melanie Crowder, Audacity (selected poems)
^{Poems included: “New York City”; “gloom”; “impossible”; “sweatshop”; “obedient”; “forbidden”; “one of us”; “summer”; “make it right”; “union”; “temporary”; “talk”; “twenty-five”; “sting”; “brave”; “you have a right”; “menagerie”; “uptown”; “part of me”; “electric”; “judgment”; “too much”; “Cooper Union”; “November 23, 1909”}
Ava Chin, Mott Street (excerpt)
Alexia Arthurs, “Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands”

UNIT 2: THE RATS DON’T RUN THIS CITY…WE DO
NYC Online

Herman Melville, “Bartleby, the Scrivener”
Jonathan D. Greenberg, “Occupy Wall Street’s Debt to Melville”
Bill Chappell, “Occupy Wall Street: From A Blog Post To A Movement”

UNIT 3: IT’S A GRID SYSTEM
Graphic Narratives of “the City”

Pierre Christin and Olivier Balez, Robert Moses: The Master Builder of New York City

UNIT 4: CATEGORY IS…
Queer New York

Bushra Rehman, Roses, in the Mouth of a Lion
Ashley Clark, “Burning down the house: why the debate over Paris is Burning rages on”
bell hooks, “Is Paris Burning?”