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WiSe 23/24: Visions and images of the city and the metropolis in theory, reality, and fiction.

Susanne Scharnowski

Kommentar

Topic: Cities are ambivalent: they condense the promises as well as the risks of modern societies. Cities are laboratories and seismographs of modernity; their technological and social dynamics render them the cradle of innovation and progress. Cities are an ideal blueprint for grand ideas of urban planners and social engineers; they provide the material for models and theories of future societies. On the other hand, and from another point of view, the risks and the dark side of modern civilization and social development accumulate in the metropolis: poverty, crime, dilapidation, isolation, alienation, mechanisation and massification, or total control through surveillance and authoritarian structures. Cities in texts may appear in various shapes; they inspire social theories, political action, aesthetic imagination and intellectual critique. Understanding prevalent images of cities helps us understand hopes and fears of our societies. Program: We will examine selected relevant theories, representations, images, and visions of cities designed by urban planners, writers, film directors and sociologists in 19th and 20th century fiction and non-fiction. Among the representations and visions we will discuss are Friedrich Engels’ chapter about the Great Towns in his “Condition of the Working Class in England”, Le Corbusier’s modernist idea of the “Radiant City” from the 1920s, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Lewis Wirth’s Urbanism as a Way of Life, and the dystopian city in fictional works by Yevgeni Zamyatin and J.G. Ballard. Is this the right course for you? The course is open to students from all fields. However, you should be able to read English texts at a high level, be prepared to study a wide variety of academic as well as literary texts and be interested in the topic as well as in textual and discourse analysis. Workload and Assessment: To obtain 5 ECTS credits, you will have to study and engage with the course materials (an average of 20 pages of academic and/ or literary texts per week), pass a mid-term test before Christmas and submit a written assignment or sit a written exam at the end of the semester. If you want to participate, you must attend the first, at the latest the second session; joining the course later won’t be possible. In general, students must attend at least 85% of the classes (14 out of 16). Schließen