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MPhil in European Literature & Culture | Course content | Modules | I-D City - The Modern City

MPhil in European Literature & Culture

Interdisciplinary | I-D City

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The Modern City
(Convenor: Professor Andrew Webber)

This modern comparative module relates directly to the research interests of a number of colleagues in the faculty. Drawing primarily on material in French, Spanish, Italian, German, Russian and English, the module will explore changing representations and meanings of the city from the late eighteenth through to the twenty-first century. While the module explores questions of reading and interpreting the city in literary texts, photography, and painting, particular attention will be paid to the city as represented in film, a medium with which it shares a particularly close relationship. The module aims to provide an introduction to key conceptualisations of the modern city by theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Manuel Castells and Henri Lefebvre. It will be particularly concerned with the relationship between the modernist city and its postmodern counterpart, with attention to such questions as psycho-topographical explorations, technological mediations and informational networking. In the past, sessions have focused on a wide variety of specific cities, with such topics as: Berlin (walled city, open city); Rome (viewed through 'postcard films' such as La Dolce Vita); Madrid (city of desire, as mapped in the films of Almodóvar); and the 'haunted city' of Alain Resnais and Marguerite Duras. Sessions might equally well be devoted to other European or non-European cities (with cities such as Los Angeles and Mexico City central in current debates about urban cultures). There will be potential too for a variety of thematic aspects of the city (such as ruins, slums, suburbs, exile and invisibility) and of generic treatments (such as film noir or city symphonies). The module is comparative in spirit and in practice, and essays written for it will have to compare material either from different language cultures or different media.

Required Reading

• Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson, ed., Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London, Wallflower, 2008)

Other Suggested Reading

• Katharina von Ankum (ed), Women in the Metropolis. Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture (Berkeley, 1997)
• Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism (London, 1973)
• Giuliana Bruno, Streetwalking on a Ruined Map (Princeton, N.J., 1993)
  
• Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, Mass., 1988)
• Manuel Castells and Peter Hall, Technopoles of the World: The Making of Twenty-First-Century Industrial Complexes (London, 1994)
  
• Mary Ann Caws, City Images. Perspectives from Literature, Philiosophy and Film (New York, 1991)
• Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkley and Los Angeles, 1984)
• David Clarke, ed., The Cinematic City (London, Routledge, 1997)
• Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London, 1990)
• David Frisby, Fragments of Modernity (Cambridge, 1988)
• Derek Glass (ed), Berlin: Literary Images of a City (Berlin, 1989)
• Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York, 1961 [reprinted London, 2000])
• Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991)
• Henri Lefebvre, Writings on Cities, ed. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas (Oxford, 1996)
• Richard T. Legates and Frederic Stout, The City Reader (London, 1996)
• Louis Mumford, The City in History, its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects (London, 1961)
• Donald J. Olsen, The City as a Work of Art (New Haven, 1986)
• Christopher Prendergast, Paris and the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1992)
• Kristin Ross, The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Commune (Minnesota, 1988)
• Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone (London, 1994)
• Georg Simmel, 'The Metropolis and Mental Life', in: Simmel on Culture, ed. by D. Frisby (London, 1997)
• Paul Julian Smith, The Moderns (Oxford, 2000)
• Paul Virilio, Open Sky (London, 1997)
• Janet Ward, Weimar Surfaces. Urban Visual Culture in 1920s Germany (Berkeley, 2001)
• Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1985)
• Raymond Williams, The Politics of Modernism (London, 1989)

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