Sex and the Historic City: Nelson
Algren’s Walking Tour of New Orleans’ Wild Side
Barbara Eckstein
Department of English
University of Iowa
Barbara Eckstein
has worked for several years with
Planning professor Jim Throgmorton on projects related to the
interaction of story and sustainability. Those efforts have
resulted in a symposium, edited collection (Story and
Sustainability MIT 2003), and a team-taught course using Iowa
City as its case study (Storytelling and Urban Engagement). She
is an associate professor in Iowa’s English Department and is
completing a book on sustained memories and sustainability in
the city of New Orleans. Entitled Sustaining New Orleans: Urban
Folkways and City Survival. It is due to Routledge in 2004.
Abstract:
“Sex and the Historic City” interprets Algren’s 1956 farcical
revision of his 1935 social realist novel Somebody in Boots
alongside the 1950s revision of New Orleans French Quarter,
first declared a protected historic preserve in 1936. Algren’s
1956 revision, retitled A Walk on the Wild Side, reconsiders
issues of an underclass and prostitution in light of mass
culture and what he views as political and social hypocrisy. The
paper attends to the interaction of historic preservation and
prostitution in the city and the reciprocal relation of both
with Algren’s first and revised representations of these forces
in the city. In the process I ask what the wild side reputation
has done for New Orleans and how its reputation has served
Algren’s critiques of American society and culture. Pursuing
answers to those questions, I consider social scientific studies
of prostitution and some of Walter Benjamin’s commentary on
prostitution as symbol, particularly as it appears in the work
of Baudelaire. Given Algren’s efforts to write from behind the
billboards, as he put it, I am intrigued by Benjamin’s
observation at the end of the Baudelaire section in the Arcades
Project: i.e., In the nineteenth century, Baudelaire’s nihilism
could act in defiance of the bourgeoisie, but in the twentieth
century this is no longer possible since the bourgeoisie have
assimilated nihilism. —BE
[Thursday, April 8;
7:30-9:30
PM; Iowa State Room, IMU (343)]
