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Module description

In this course, students will study how the city has been understood, imagined and culturally represented throughout the modern period. We will focus on the unique role that the city held from the nineteenth century onwards as the ultimate expression of modernity by drawing on variety of sources spanning from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. We will trace how the role and the imaginary of the city have evolved from the once glittering metropolis of the nineteenth century to the colonial and imperial legacies of European cities today. We will discuss the role of cities as incubators of radical thought and political protest. In addition to discussing issues of deurbanization and the relative decline of cities in post-war Europe, we will look at the emergence of the post-modern ‘megacities’ and so-called ‘smartcities’ of today and ask what form of radical potential they harbour for the future. The city will be approached through a number of theoretical perspectives - historical, sociological, and cultural - to explore the range of fascination and revulsion that the city continues to exert.Ìý
The first part of the course will introduce the broad contours of the historiography of urbanization, major theoretical debates and changing terminologies surrounding European and American cities from the late nineteenth century onwards to the present day. In the second half, we will engage more specifically with how writers, artists, photographers, and filmmakers have depicted the city.Ìý
For their coursework, students are encouraged to explore cities that are of interest to them. They might choose to explore cities through any medium such as film, literature, photography, maps (print or digital), or via social media and online images. Alternatively, students may wish to study the history of social/ or protest movements that have appropriated and re-imagined city spaces in new ways.Ìý

Preparatory Reading

Introductory reading:

Lehan, Richard Daniel. The City in Literature: An Intellectual and Cultural History (University of California Press, 1998).Ìý
Mumford, Lewis. The Culture of Cities, (Secker and Warburg, 1940).Ìý
Richard Sennett. The Uses of Disorder: Personal Identity and City Life. (Penguin, 1973).Ìý
V Tinkler-Villani. Babylon or New Jerusalem?: Perceptions of the City in Literature (Rodopi, 2005).Ìý
Anthony D King (ed.), Re-Presenting the City: Ethnicity, Capital and Culture in the 21st Century Metropolis (Macmillan, 1995).Ìý
Desmond Harding, Writing the City: Urban Visions and Literary Modernism (London: Routledge, 2003).Ìý
David Harvey, Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution (Verso, 2012).Ìý
Mary Ann Caws (ed) City Images. Perspectives from Literature, Philosophy and Film (Gordon and Breach, 1991).Ìý
Maria Balshaw and Liam Kennedy, Urban space and representation, (Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000).Ìý
Sallie Westwood and John Williams, Imagining cities: scripts, signs, memory, (London: Routledge, 1996).Ìý
Anthony D. King, Spaces of global cultures: architecture, urbanism, identity (London: Routledge, 2004)Ìý