Modern and Contemporary Studies: Experiences of the Metropolis: from Baudelaire to Benjamin
Timetable
Monday 10-13 hr.
Lipsius building, room 030
Method of instruction
Seminar
Description
Roughly from 1850 on, industrialization and urbanism profoundly transform European towns like London, Paris and Berlin, making them into the industrial, economical and cultural capitals of their time. In all branches of art and in architecture, the birth of the modern metropolis triggered a new aesthetics: the aesthetics of modernity. In the first three sessions, we will approach this new aesthetics both through one of its main representatives, Baudelaire, and through the critical writings of Walter Benjamin, whose Arcades Project (Das Passagenwerk) is an analysis of Paris as a “capital of the 19th century”.
The second section of this seminar will discuss the metropolis in terms of its art, design and material culture. It will discuss forms of art, architecture and design which played an important role in the experiences a city could evoke, like arcades (passages), department stores, slums, and the artist’s city villa, designed and furnished to escape the metropolis while celebrating its art.
The third section will focus on the experience of the city as fearful, fragmented and uncanny. It will take Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-3) as an example of a totalising city text and a prototypical detective novel, one that portrays the metropolis as a site of secrets and fugitive selves. We will read two novels that examine the urban figure of the Anarchist terrorist: Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907) and G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (1908). Finally, the section explores the fugitive fears of the urban Gothic, partly in relation to the mythic status of Jack the Ripper, in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), Arthur Machen’s The Great God Pan (1894) and Alfred Hitchcock’s film, The Lodger (1926).
The last section will focus on Latin-American culture. In Latin-American literature the experience of the metropolis is not limited to life in cities like Buenos Aires, São Paulo and Mexico City, but is also triggered by “model” cities, especially Paris. In literary texts the experience of the metropolis is often represented as a double experience, directed inwards as well as outwards. Writers like José Martí, Oswald de Andrade and Julio Cortázar will be read.
From week to week
1) The metropolis and the aesthetics of modernity (Baudelaire: “The poet of modern life”)
2) Figures of the metropolis: the ‘ flâneur’ and the ‘homme des foules’ (Edgar Allan Poe, “ The Man of the Crowd”, Baudelaire: “Les foules”)
3) Passages, panoramas and fashion (Benjamin, The Arcades Project).
4) Tropes in the city: the arcade, the department store, the building blocks
5) Gender and the city: the notion of gendered spaces
6) Art and material culture in public life: world exhibitions, museums, salons
7) Design and the city: visualizing modern life through art and design
8) The metropolis as a site of secrets and fugitive selves.
9) The urban figure of the Anarchist terrorist
10) The Urban Gothic
11) The journalist as ‘flâneur’ and observer of the modern city. “The Brooklyn Bridge” (José Martí).
12) Urban avant-garde poetics and metropolitan fashions. (Oswald de Andrade, Oliverio Girondo, Norah Lange and others)
13) Double cities. Passages between Buenos Aires and Paris. Lautréamont in Julio Cortázar’s “The other heaven”.
Course objectives
The aim of this seminar is to acquire insight into the aesthetics of the metropolis in the 19th and 20th centuries, both in the field of literature and in the field of art, design and material culture, and in their respective crossovers. The student is able to get an understanding of the difficulties of different forms of discourse from each specialized field and possible crossovers. S/he can delineate a field of research and apply this insight to an original research thesis. S/he is able to write a well structured paper with apparatus, in which the aforementioned thesis has been researched.
Required reading
Joseph Conrad, ‘The Secret Agent’ (Penguin Classics)
G. K. Chesterton, ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’ (Penguin).
Charles Dickens, ‘Bleak House’ (Penguin Classics).
Arthur Machen, ‘The Great God Pan’ (published with The Hill of Dreams) (Dover Publications).
Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ (Penguin Classics).
Further reading will be announced in September on the Blackboardcourse of this Mphil course.
Examination
Contributions to class discussion, presentation (25%) and paper (75%).
Information
dr. A. Schulte Nordholt
tel. 071-5272170.