Metropolitan Modernities (Postgraduate)

This course will introduce students to the various ways in which cities around the world have been imagined, experienced and represented, enabling students to explore the inter-relationship between modernity and urban environments through twentieth-century and contemporary literature and film. This course is jointly taught with undergraduate students. This team-taught course will introduce students to the various ways in which cities around the world have been imagined, experienced and represented. Covering cities prominent in Western modernist arts and literature (London, Paris, New York) as well as postcolonial cities (Johannesburg, Fort de France) and imagined cities (Calvino's Venice, Batman's Gotham), the course will give a sense of the diverse ways in which expressions of modernity are intimately linked to the idea and the experience of the city. Beginning with Walter Benjamin's explorations of walking in the city, the course will consider such key figures as the flaneur, the outsider, the migrant, the detective, and the criminal, while key themes will include psychogeography, the aesthetics of urban decay, and the city as text, as archive, as spectral, and as divided. Primary texts will include literary, film and visual material, from Benjamin to J.G. Ballard via Virginia Woolf, W.G. Sebald and Christopher Nolan. Credit Level: 11 Year taken: Postgraduate