Urban environments pose particular challenges to the work of the poet, dramatist or prose-narrator. This panel focuses on literature of the American city and, in particular, on those literary moments when architectures, streetscapes, and neighborhood cultures draw attention to themselves.

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In his 1856 poem “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” Walt Whitman observes that he is, like the reader, “one of a crowd,” and he does so in a poem that offers readers evocatively urban scenes of factories, shipping, and city-dwellers. As Whitman meditates on the aesthetic experience of rubbing elbows with complete strangers, his poem reminds readers that urban life is a worthy subject of literary representation, as worthy as life in the more pastoral settings of traditional poetry.

Situated in New York’s East River, Whitman likewise offers readers a distinctly American take on urban life. While the model for American cities was arguably European, American urban-development, dependent on immigrant communities from around the world and always sensitive to the vast reaches of less urban locales further west, established itself as a geographically and culturally distinct mode of communal concentration. Building on Whitman’s insights and its potential to disrupt established literary precedents, this panel examines those moments in U. S. literature when readers must acknowledge the urban setting and the unique language of community that cities invoke in the stories we tell about them.

Aligning itself with this year’s PAMLA conference theme—City of God, City of Destruction—this panel seeks a generically, historically, and culturally diverse array of presentations on the city in U. S. literature addressing but not limited to:

• The cultures of urban ethnic enclaves.
• Urban mobility in literature.
• The city as viewed from outside in surrounding rural areas.
• Architectures of urban life, production and consumption.
• American cities in the larger international or comparative context.
• The urban/suburban divide in literature.
• Community-formation and the commingling of strangers.
• The rhetoric of urban dysfunction and crisis in literature.