Humanities 54: the Urban Imagination Professor Julie Buckler (Slavic and Comparative Literature)

Humanities 54: The Urban Imagination Professor Julie Buckler (Slavic and Comparative Literature)

Aditya Menon (Head TF) Mark Duerksen (Digital Teaching Fellow)

Sever Hall 303 Fall 2015, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00-3:30pm

Cities are one of humankind’s most richly complex inventions and can best be understood through both creative and critical thinking. Offered in connection with a Mellon-funded initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities, this course invites you to join an interdisciplinary investigation of the urban form and fabric, socio- political life, cultural history, and artistic representations of five iconic cities -- Boston, Berlin, Moscow, Istanbul, and Mumbai. We will explore literature, film, and photography, experiment with urban fieldwork, and work with digital tools for mapping and curating virtual exhibitions.

The collective end product of the course will be a public digital exhibition in which individual student work is credited by name.

THIS COURSE IS APPROVED FOR GEN ED CREDIT IN AESTHETIC AND INTERPRETIVE UNDERSTANDING.

Assignments and Course Grading

Class attendance and participation (25% of grade) Blog entries on readings and films – weekly (25% of grade)

Seven unit assignments: Sept 13, Sept 27, Oct 11, Oct 25, Nov 8, Nov 22, Dec 6 (30% of grade)

10-page final essay in Omeka, synthesizing unit assignments -- Dec 10 (20% of grade)

Digital Training and Tools

The primary digital tools we’ll use for the course work are Omeka (an open source content management system for online digital collections) and Neatline (a framework building and publishing interactive maps). We will offer training and consultation throughout the semester.

We will also visit the Pusey Map Collection and Loeb Library Special Collections at the Graduate School of Design, where we will learn to work with historical materials, particularly maps and city plans. Students will use the materials they discover in their Omeka and Neatline projects.

Course Materials

The following books are available for purchase at the Coop:

Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities Blackwell City Reader, second edition, eds. Bridge and Watson Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887 Dick Lehr and Gerard O’Neill, Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found

These books are also held on reserve in Lamont library, as are the required films for the course.

Academic Integrity and Collaboration Policy Statement

Discussion and the exchange of ideas are essential to academic work. For assignments in this course, you are encouraged to consult with your classmates on the choice of paper topics and to share sources. You may find it useful to discuss your chosen topic with your peers, particularly if you are working on the same topic as a classmate. However, you should ensure that any written work you submit for evaluation is the result of your own research and writing and that it reflects your own approach to the topic. You must also adhere to standard citation practices in this discipline and properly cite any books, articles, websites, lectures, etc. that have helped you with your work. If you received any help with your writing (feedback on drafts, etc.), you must also acknowledge this assistance.

2 Course Schedule

INTRO UNIT

Th 9/3 – Introductory session

Tues 9/8 Charles Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” (1863) Dziga Vertov, Man with a Movie Camera (film, 1929)

Thurs 9/10 Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (1972) Fritz Lang, Metropolis (film, 1927)

Blackwell City Reader: Walter Benjamin, “The Arcades Project” Franco Moretti, “Homo Palpitans: Balzac’s Novels and Urban Personality” Peter Preston and Paul Simpson-Housley, “Writing the City” James Donald, “Imagining the Modern City: Light in Dark Spaces” Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” Michel de Certeau, “The Practice of Everyday Life” Iris Marion Young, “The Ideal of Community and the Politics of Difference”

Also recommended: Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (excerpt)

Those who want even more can try Benjamin's "Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century" and Dziga Vertov's "We. A Version of a Manifesto" and "The CineEyes: A Revolution."

Unit Assignment due Sept 13: Close reading and annotation of literary excerpt and film clip using Social Book.

BOSTON

Tues 9/15 Robert Lowell, “For the Union Dead” (1960) Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888) Thurs 9/17 Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward 2000-1887 (1888), continued

3 BOSTON, continued

Tues 9/22 Peter Yates, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (film, 1973) Lehr and O’Neill, Black Mass: Whitey Bulger, the FBI, and a Devil’s Deal (Part One only) Thurs 9/24 Martin Scorsese, The Departed (film, 2006)

Blackwell City Reader Friedrich Engels, “The Great Towns” Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, “The Continuing Causes of Segregation” William Julius Wilson, “The Truly Disadvantaged” Jane Jacobs, “The Death and Life of Great American Cities” Richard Sennett, "The Public Realm" Michel Foucault, "Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison" David Harvey, "The Urban Process under Capitalism: A Framework for Analysis" Allen J. Scott, "Metropolis: From the Division of Labor to Urban Form"

Unit Assignment due Sept 27: Omeka essay -- documentation of Boston site in writing, photo, audio, film.

BERLIN

Tues 9/29 Alfred Lichtenstein, “Songs to Berlin” (WWI-era) Walter Ruttman, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (film, 1927) Thurs 10/1 Vladimir Nabokov, “A Guide to Berlin” (1925)

Tues 10/6 Alfred Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) Thurs 10/8 Döblin, Berlin Alexanderplatz, continued Jan Ole Gerster, A Coffee in Berlin (film, 2012)

Blackwell City Reader Michael Dear and Hector Manuel Lucero, “Postborder Cities, Postborder World” Judith R. Walkowitz, “City of Dreadful Delight” Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, “Cities and the Geographies of ‘Actually Existing Neoliberalism’”

Unit Assignment due Oct 11: Mapping a Neighborhood or Cultural Landscape – Neatline way-points.

4 MOSCOW

Tues 10/13 Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (excerpt) Marina Tsvetaeva, “Verses About Moscow” (1916) Thurs 10/15 Aleksandr Medvedkin, New Moscow (film, 1938) Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita (1928-40) – BOOK ONE Rodchenko/Stepanova photo-book Moscow is Being Reconstructed (1938)

Tues 10/20 Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita – BOOK TWO Thurs 10/22 Marlen Khutsiev, I am Twenty (film, 1965)

Blackwell City Reader John Urry, “Connections” Nigel Thrift, “Driving in the City” Ernest W. Burgess, “The Growth of the City” Le Corbusier, “The City of Tomorrow and its Planning”

Unit Assignment due Oct 25: Mapping a Themed Tour/Trajectory – Omeka essay and Neatline way-points.

ISTANBUL

Tues 10/27 Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de mémoire” Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003) – Chapters 1-11 Thurs 10/29 Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003) – Chapters 12-25 Orhan Veli Kanik, “I Listen to Istanbul”

Tues 11/3 Fatih Akin, Crossing the Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul (film, 2005) Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City (2003) – Chapters 26-37 Thurs 11/5 Onur Ünlü, Let’s Sin (film, 2014)

ISTANBUL, continued

Blackwell City Reader Edward W. Soja, “Six Discourses on the Postmetropolis: Saskia Sassen, “The Global City: Introducing a Concept” John Hull Mollenkopf, “How to Study Urban Political Power” Susan S. Fainstein, “New Directions in Planning Theory”

Unit Assignment due Nov 8: Mapping a Lieu de mémoire – Neatline timeline.

MUMBAI

Tues 11/10 Suketu Mehta, Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found (2004), Part I, pp. 3-130 Thurs 11/12 Mehta, Maximum City, Part I, pp. 131-249 Ritesh Batra, Lunchbox (film, 2013)

Tues 11/17 Mehta, Maximum City, Part II Anurag Kashyap, Black Friday (film, 2004) Thurs 11/19 Mehta, Maximum City, Part III Nishikant Kamat, Mumbai Meri Jaan (film, 2008)

Blackwell City Reader Arjun Appadurai, “Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger” Sujata Patel, “Mumbai: The Mega-City of a Poor Country” Anthony D. King, “Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-Economy”

Unit Assignment Nov 22: Mapping a historical event’s urban afterlife – Omeka essay and Neatline timeline.

CONCLUSION: Special Case Study: Łódź, Poland

Tues 11/24 Władysław Reymont, Promised Land (1898), Chapters 1-6 (pp. 2-131)

6 Łódź, continued

Tues 12/1 Joseph Roth, Hotel Savoy (1924), Books One and Two (pp. 3-76) Andrzej Wajda, Promised Land (film, 1975) Thurs 12/3 Israel Joseph Singer, The Brothers Ashkenazi (1937), Part I (pp. 3-174)

Recommended: Memory Unearthed: The Łódź Ghetto Photographs of Henryk Ross (2015) Frank Smith, My Secret Camera: Life in the Łódź Ghetto (2000)

Unit Assignment due Dec 6: Mapping Urban Cultural Systems – Omeka essay and Neatline (way-points/timeline).

10-page essay (“landing page”) in Omeka, synthesizing unit assignments – due Dec 10.