NewBritainHerald.com

October 22, 2007

CCSU professor publishes book on NYC slums
By: SCOTT WHIPPLE, Herald staff

NEW BRITAIN - Robert M. Dowling, associate professor of English at Central Connecticut State University, was born in New York, and years of travel couldn't dampen his vigor for his home state.

After living in places from Wisconsin to Czechoslovakia and California, Dowling, 37, felt drawn back to the East Coast and sated his New York curiosity, turning hours of research into a published book: "Slumming in New York: From the Waterfront to Mythic Harlem."

Published by the University of Illinois Press, the book explores the underbelly of New York City life from 1880 to 1930.

It takes readers through the city's distinctive neighborhood cultures and shows how the rich and poor, foreign-born and native-born competed for a voice from such diverse vantage points as the East Side waterfront, the Bowery, the Tenderloin's "Black Bohemia," the Jewish Lower East Side and the mythic Harlem.

Helping readers understand the relationship between New York writing and the city's cultural environment from the 1880s through the Roaring Twenties, Dowling employs both fictional and nonfictional narratives.

A native of Pleasantville, N.Y., Dowling later graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a Bachelor of Arts degree in history.

He took classes at the New School for Social Research on how to teach English as a second language and parlayed that into a job teaching English in Czechoslovakia, and later in Chelyabinsk, Siberia.

"I was going through a phase," he says. "I wanted to become an Eastern European scholar and write about Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevski, Turgenev, also the Czech writers."

Dowling says he is still enormously impressed with Vaclav Havel, a playwright and president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 through 1992.

After a year and a half, Dowling returned to America to complete his English course at the New School.
When his father died, he decided to stay in the Greater New York area - for awhile.

"Then I did a 180," he says. "Maybe it was that winter in Siberia, but California's warmth beckoned."

After driving cross-country, Dowling settled in Costa Mesa. He earned his master's degree at the University of California, Fullerton.

But after a few years, he developed strong nostalgia for New York City. Every paper he wrote was about New York.

So he decided to return to the East Coast. He earned his Ph.D. in English and American Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Before joining the CCSU faculty, he lived in New York City on 42nd Street, in Greenwich Village on 9th Street and later on City Island.

Dowling studied with David S. Reynolds, a renowned Walt Whitman scholar and author of "Walt Whitman in America." Other scholars honed Dowling's interest in American literature and encouraged him to turn "Slumming" from a dissertation into a book.

"I opened the narrative up to a more general audience," he explains. "Anyone interested in New York City's history and its literature should get a lot out of it."

According to Katherine Joslin, author of "Jane Addams, a Writer's Life," Dowling's new book "gracefully weaves together reformist tracts, sociological studies, and realist and naturalist fiction at the turn of the last century. It is rigorously interdisciplinary in its literary, historical and sociological approach to novels, social tracts, ragtime and jazz, minstrel shows, vaudeville and Yiddish theater, and the 'slumming' that took place across the boundaries of race and class in New York City."

James R. Giles, author of "The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America," hailed the book as a "fascinating study of an important genre of American literature. Dowling is especially sophisticated in his reversal of the usual concepts of 'outsider' and 'insider' narratives. His treatment of the concept of space(s) is innovative and insightful and will be useful to those interested in urban studies and the literature of New York City."

Dowling says sales have been strong, and he has been asked to give readings at various Borders book stores in the state.

Since joining the Central faculty, he has written articles in scholarly journals and critical anthologies on late 19th- and early 20th-century American literature and cultural history.

In his American Realism and Naturalism class, he teaches Walt Whitman, Eugene O'Neill and Wallace Thurman, as well as the Beat Generation writers, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

Dowling says his next book will be a series of essays on O'Neill. "Writing a book like this is a discovery," Dowling says. "I've learned that O'Neill was not a natural writer. He achieved the grandest accomplishment in American drama through the sheer force of his indomitable will. He sat down and made himself write."