In this class we will discuss the representation of the city in both literature and film. We will read a selection of representative urban poetry and fiction that tries to give an overview of the developments over the past few centuries: Starting in 1642 with John Denham’s poem “Coopers Hill”, we will retrace urban growth and its cultural implications in a variety of ‘urban imaginaries’ - such as Swift’s critical take on 18th-century London in his city poetry or T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land for a modernist view of the city - that pave the way for 20th- and 21st-century urban fictions and lead us for instance to Paul Auster’s famous New York Trilogy. We will both contemplate what it means to represent ‘urbanity’ and be able to observe how cultural changes can be retraced in narrative modes. We may even have a look at some very recent 21st-century narrative strategies in fictions that are informed by digital structures, such as Daniel Danielewski’s intermedial House of Leaves, Norman Klein’s semi-hypertextual fiction Bleeding Through and Jonathan Safran Foer’s innovative die-cutting technique in Tree of Codes.
We will also watch an example of filmic urban representation (Fritz Lang’s Metropolis or Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation might be suggestions) in one session.
A reader providing the key texts will be available at the copy shop on Reckhammerweg from early September onwards. |
