ABSTRACT

"New York, New York" means more than the city of New York in the state of New York. The expression suggests the repetitiveness of New York ? based as it is on the most rational and uniform of grid-plans ? but also its excessive character. It is such an extraordinary city that saying its name just once, just wouldn't do. "New York" is almost the only proper adjective for New York. It is one of those cities which we have already seen before we get to see it in actuality.

This lecture focuses on the late 19^th and early 20^th century in New York, when the paradox of rationalisation and excess became fully visible in New York, and when artists and writers with a strong visual sense became caught up in these aspects of modernity. Novelists such as Edith Wharton, Henry James and William Dean Howells, and visual artists such as George Bellows and Childe Hassam, practised an aesthetics that was inextricable from material changes (the elevated railroad, the building up of the city on its grid plan, skyscrapers and so on).

BIOGRAPHY

Douglas Tallack is Professor of American Studies and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at the University of Nottingham, where he has responsibility for the University’s international activities, including its campuses in China and Malaysia. He was formerly Head of the School of American & Canadian Studies and Dean of Arts. Douglas Tallack is an Honorary Professor at Tsinghua University.

Professor Tallack’s books are

• New York Sights: Visualizing Old and New New York
• City Sites: Multi-Media Essays on New York and Chicago.
• The Nineteenth-Century American Short Story: Language, Form and Ideology
• Twentieth-Century America: An Intellectual and Cultural History
• Critical Theory: A Reader
• Literary Theory at Work: Three Texts

He has twice won the Arthur Miller Prize for the best American Studies article of the year. He is the editor of a series of electronic books on international themes to be published by Melbourne University Press, and will edit the volume entitled Global Cities/Local Sites (forthcoming 2008).

Professor Tallack directed the 3Cities project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He has been a member of the UK Government’s Marshall Commission, as well as local school and college governing bodies, and is currently on the Advisory Board of the Observatory for Borderless Education.