Meet Your Summer Mentor: Helena
Topic: Literature of the City
This program focuses on exploring the rich literary history and traditions of New York City. The topic presents us with a huge range of material, from the Dutch founding of the city in its early years as a trading post and farmland, up through numerous famous literary movements during New York's long tenure as a cultural center. We look at New York as literary imaginary, and trace ways in which the city has been defined and personified in different literary works. We look at how literature centered on New York has shaped the city's development and idea of itself, and what particular kinds of writing this very small, very saturated, more-imaginary-than-real place produces. Sub-topics include early novels of manners (Wharton, James) and New York's attempt to define itself against European social capitals; the mid-century confessional poets and their relationship with the growing downtown art scene; the 'New York memoir' from early Dutch and British settlers up through Patti Smith and Richard Hell's punk scene memoirs; and/or New York as imaginary, looking at the city fictionalized in sources from Helprin's Winter's Tale to Frank Miller's The Dark Night Returns. This course will draw on extensive living materials, making hands-on use of archives and sites right here in the city.
Helena Fitzgerald, Professional Writer & BA/BFA in English - NYU
Helena Fitzgerald has been tutoring numerous academic and standardized testing subjects since early 2005. Over the last nearly ten years, she has has helped students from middle school to graduate school with their academic goals, standardized test preparation, and college and graduate school admissions processes. Her areas of specialization include the GMAT and the SAT, intensive courses in SSAT and ISEE, most SAT subject tests and many AP exams. She focuses particularly on helping strong Verbal students to whom Math comes less easily raise their Math scores on the SAT and GMAT. Academically, she specializes in English literature, American and European History, Latin, essay-writing, as well as one-on-one guidance through the college application process. Both in person and online, she has taught students all over the world, and has been lucky enough to spend time teaching in London, Geneva, Zurich, Paris, Rome, Barcelona, and Zimbabwe. Graduate and undergraduate applicants whom she has coached in their standardized tests and applications processes have gone on to be accepted to Yale, Wesleyan, NYU, Stanford, and Harvard, among many other schools.
Helena was born in New York City and studied at Columbia University and New York University, completing an Honors English Literature thesis on James Joyce's Ulysses. When not tutoring, Helena has also pursued a career as an author and served as a Contributing Editor and Senior Contributor at The New Inquiry, a journal of literary and cultural criticism. Her work for The New Inquiry has been excerpted or cited in The Atlantic, Harper's, Bookforum, Inside Higher Education, The New York Times, and The Nation, among many others.
Helena is a great believer in individualized study, one-on-one attention for students, and the benefits of developing a curriculum based on a student's specific learning style. She is deeply passionate about helping students unlock their full academic abilities and achieve higher scores of which they’re capable.
Interview with Helena
1) Why are you excited to mentor this topic?
I’ve spent the last five years writing a novel about New York City, specifically the 1970s. Although the book focuses only on one era, my research for this project has taken me far and wide and back and forth through the history of this city where we live. Each year has left me more obsessed with the strange, hyperbolic, imaginary history of this place. At the same time, I’ve come to understand that this obsession itself is a deep-rooted literary tradition. New York is an incredible place to live because it’s a museum of itself, and the whole city can be approached as a literary text. For a student of literature, the whole city is a library. I’d be incredibly excited to work with a student on using their love of literature to engage with the place where they live, and using the place they live as a unique tool for their study of literature.
2) What inspired you to pursue this interest?
I was born in New York City, moved back here for college, and never left. Before that, my parents both lived in the city for twenty-odd years. Growing up, they told me stories of “the bad old days” in New York, and I grew my idea of an adult world out of those stories. In college and beyond, I began to investigate this family history and personal interest as an academic topic, and found my same feelings about this city mirrored in numerous works of literature (and other art forms). I also delved into New York’s cultural and economic history, and the more I learned about the city, the stranger and more fascinating it became. This led to a novel (and a second one I’m now working on that’s also about the city, although from a completely different perspective and era). The literary traditions, tropes, and imaginaries in this city are an endless source of material and fascination, and yield incredible returns the more one begins to engage with them.
3) What will I get out of this mentorship?
We will work together during our first week or two of the mentorship to determine the shape of the final project. Likely, the project will culminate in a college-level long academic research paper on a specific sub-topic of the student’s choosing. In working on this final project, the student will also gain skills useful for college-level literature or history work, learning approaches to in-depth research and bibliographical citation for that research, as well as how to sustain an examination of a topic over a much longer piece of writing than they may have previously attempted. However, according to the student’s interest, a more creative final project is also an option, and the final project could be a creative writing piece of fiction or narrative non-fiction focused on a particular sub-topic within New York City literature, or even written in the style/tradition of a particular New York literary movement. More practically, the course will offer skills in literary research, close-reading, and potentially longform creative writing.