Learning from St. Louis: How Can Literary Studies Work with the Public Urban Humanities?

As an academic discipline, literary scholarship brings the struggle for linguistic and cultural literacy to the interdisciplinary urban humanities and the public humanities. Writers on urban humanities and public humanities may mention literary studies but tend to draw on other fields, such as architecture and design, or cultural history and memory studies. Literary scholars inevitably focus on the past, since their work centres on literary texts that already exist, and this distinguishes them from urbanists, focused more on the present and future. But humanities disciplines, including literary studies, can blaze trails for ‘generative’ scholarship ‘imagining future implications for the city’ (Cuff et al. 2020: 155, 156). Public humanists propose a ‘socially engaged humanities’ able to leave the highly segregated American university campus, to read ‘literature […] in storefronts and row houses’ (Smulyan 2022: 35). Directing our reading of texts produced in various past contexts towards the future could form part of such an outward-looking project. Referring to case-study texts that thematize residential segregation and inequality in twentieth-century St. Louis, in the Midwestern United States, this essay aims to clarify the relationship between literary studies and the public urban humanities.