literature and the city

Here is the CFP I just wrote:

City University of New York Graduate Center
English Student Association Conference
Conference Date: March 24, 2005
Call for Papers and Panels:

"literature and the city"

From Babylon to New Jerusalem, Mecca to Rome, New York to Paris, London to Calcutta, Canterbury to Weimar Berlin, Troy to Gotham, Camelot to R’yleh – for centuries, cities have figured in literature as much more than simple geography. Whether represented as the glorious apex of civilization, the ancient repository of monument and memory, or the destructive engine of modernity, the literary city provides a space in which ideas are continually forced to collide and mate with varying degrees of violence and seduction.

“literature and the city” is a conference organized and sponsored by the English Student Association at CUNY Graduate Center. This conference seeks to bring together graduate students from a wide variety of political, critical, and aesthetic perspectives to explore how cities function in literature as both subject and setting. We invite papers that examine the multitudinous ways in which cities have captured the literary imagination and that scrutinize the complex relationships between language, art, and metropolis.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

New York
London
Paris
Rome
Holy Cities (Jerusalem, Mecca, etc)
Urban Architecture
Imaginary/Fictionalized Cities
The Ghetto
The City vs. the Country
The Marketplace
Claustrophobia
Multicultural Cities
Alienation and Loneliness
The City-State
Bohemians
Street Life
City as Character
City Dialects in Literature
Vice, Decadence & the Demimonde
Outside City Boundaries
Divided Cities (Berlin, Jerusalem, Warsaw)
The City and Revolution
The City in Theater and Film
Lyric Essays on the City

Please submit abstracts of 250 words