A Study Guide for Teju Cole's "Open City"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Teju Cole's "Open City", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: May 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780028671338

Book preview

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Open City

Teju Cole

2011

Introduction

Open City (2011) is a meditatively captivating, cosmopolitan novel by Teju Cole about the life of a biracial Nigerian man on the cusp of a career in psychiatry and his wanderings around post-9/11 New York City as diverse peoples—especially immigrants and minorities—fill his days with inspiration. Cole infused his novel, through the protagonist and narrator Julius, with elaborations on the aesthetics of great creators ranging from the German composer Gustav Mahler through the American artist John Brewster to the Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, among many others.

The consummately learned narrator, Julius, demonstrates from the opening page a profound capacity for both connection and perception as he immerses himself in the sights and occurrences around him not only with his senses but also with his open consciousness. The reader is swept up in his acutely sensitive manner as he goes through the paces of his psychiatry internship, takes a refreshing trip to Brussels, spends time with friends, and wanders around the city on foot and by subway, learning the stories of people from different countries and cultures and trying to make sense of it all. He also just might learn something startling about himself—or perhaps not.

Author Biography

Cole was born on June 27, 1975, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to Nigerian parents, who subsequently returned to their homeland to raise Cole in the capital of Lagos. Cole was an enthusiastic reader as a child, taking in, by the age of ten, the Nigerian literary forefather Chinua Achebe's classic Things Fall Apart and versions of Shakespeare's plays and Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer. Cole returned to the United States in 1992 to earn his bachelor of arts degree from Kalamazoo College in 1996 with additional coursework at Western Michigan University and the University of Michigan. He earned master's degrees from the University of London in 2000 and Columbia University in 2006. He undertook doctoral studies in art history at Columbia University while teaching courses.

Media Adaptations

An audiobook version of Open City read by Kevin Mambo was released by Recorded Books in 2011. The run time is nine hours, five minutes.

Having published a novella in Nigeria in 2007, Cole made his US debut with his first novel, Open City, which was issued in 2011 to highly admiring reviews. It won several awards, including the 2012 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for the year's most impressive debut novel, and was short-listed for several others. It also won the New York City Book Award and the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Cole revised his 2007 novella, Every Day Is for the Thief, for mainstream Western publication in 2014. His also wrote Known and Strange Things: Essays (2016) and Blind Spot (2017), a book of photographs and related essays.

Cole was writer-in-residence at Bard College, New York, and at the Literaturhaus