Dawn Powell: Satire, the City, and American Bohemia
From her hopeful arrival in 1920 until her death in poverty in 1965, Dawn Powell became one of the premier chroniclers of mid-century literary New York City, drawing comparisons to Balzac and Mark Twain in her depictions of the human comedy within an urban milieu. From her vantage in Greenwich Village, she crafted satirical novels over four decades that combine a sardonic wit and keen eye for detail with genuine empathy, garnering Powell a devoted cult following even as popular renown and academic recognition have eluded her both during and after her life. In lyrical prose inspired by classical and modern satirists, Powell offers a social realism deeply inflected by the modernist aesthetics of her time and the often fumbling search for more liberated possibilities against the background of Victorian moral stricture. Her New York novels are at once invaluable historical documents, evoking in detail a now faded New York bohemia; while also capturing in a timeless fashion the energy, ambition, and minor tragedies that characterize the quest to “make it,” then and now. How, reading Powell, can we understand the particular frisson of art, ambition, sex, and commerce as they combine, in the modern city, to engender creative cultures and shape contemporary taste? How does Powell’s New York bohemia compare to the creative class, and creative conditions, that prevail today?
In this course, we will read two of Powell’s critically acclaimed novels that depict the Greenwich Village scene in its Twenties heyday as well as the sterner exuberance following World War Two: Turn, Magic Wheel (1936) and The Locusts Have No King (1948). Both novels focus on aspiring writers as they navigate the hopes and disappointments of art and love, and the experimental latitude that the “imaginary city” of bohemian life allowed in both realms. In addition to these novels, we will also read excerpts from Powell’s celebrated diaries to compare fact and fiction as well as short pieces by her contemporaries and critical foils. What perspective does Powell’s satirical eye and vision of a social totality offer us on the value of bohemian spaces for personal realization and cultural innovation? How did Powell’s imaginary city interact with the more practical structures of class, gender, and commerce during her time? What lessons do her rich portraits of artistic scenes a century ago have to teach us about the possibilities of art and personal liberation in the more constrained neoliberal spaces of contemporary New York? Besides Powell’s writing, readings will include selections from Fitzgerald, Edmund Wilson, Joseph Mitchell, Diana Trilling, Gore Vidal, and Lorrie Moore as well as theoretical and historical excerpts by Petronius, Georg Lukacs, Jerrold Seigel, and Christine Stansell.
Course Schedule
Thursday, 6:30-9:30pm ETNovember 14 — December 12, 2024
4 sessions over 5 weeks
Class will not meet Thursday, November 28th.
$335.00
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