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‘Complexity’ has long been recognized as a key characteristic of urban life. One of the most recent and ambitious attempts to provide urban studies with an integrating approach, Frank Eckhardt’s masterful study Die komplexe Stadt: Orientierungen im urbanen Labyrinth (2009) even goes so far as to propose complexity as the key characteristic of the city suitable to serve as a foundation for urban research generally. From the perspective of literary and cultural studies, the question is how the complexity of the urban text is represented in literature and other media. This seminar will engage with some of the theoretical issues involved in literary representations of urban complexity, but we will mainly be studying a number of key texts from the 17th to the 21st century. Examples will include both little-known texts as well as classics such as The Prelude, Ulysses, The Waste Land, or The New York Trilogy.
Note: A reader containing all texts to be discussed will be available in the copy-shop Reckhammerweg from early March onwards. Students are expected to read the first two texts in the reader for the first session. There may be reading tests.
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