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This seminar will engage with key theoretical issues as well as with a broad range of representations of the city. The first part of the course will engage with key theoretical issues in the study of urban representations (functions of urban imaginaries, the role of imaginaries in the perception of cities, approaches in urban literary and cultural studies, problems of representation, questions of mediality). In the second part of the semester, we will discuss poetic as well as narrative representations, ranging from Swift, Gay and Pope in the 18th century via Wordsworth, Hazlitt, Shelley and other Romantics, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens and other Victorian writers, classic 20th-century texts such as Joyce’s Uysses, Eliot’s Waste Land, Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer all the way to recent experimental fiction. Depending on the interests of the participants, other media and genres (graphic novels, film, multimedia, computer games ...) can also be considered. The selection of texts can be agreed upon in the course.
A reader with a first selection of texts will be available in the copyshop in Reckhammerweg from early March onwards. All participants are to read the first two texts in the reader for the first session.
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