From the Ritz to the rubble…
… you can find everything in a big city. Look up at skyscrapers, look down into dark alleys. You can brush shoulders with trendy yuppies and with deprived homeless people on the same street. You may live in a superb mansion or in a dilapidated social housing block.
This course will tour the major cities of the USA and the UK, with a special focus on New York City and London, to explore what it means to be a city-dweller. Town planners design cities, sociologists study the interaction between the people who live in cities, urban workers worry about commuting. Poets are inspired by their iron-and-concrete surroundings, novelists make the city the décor of their stories, film directors shoot on location, musicians write songs about their hometown. Whether they praise it or loathe it, whether they thrive on urban chaos or yearn for peace in the countryside, artists cannot ignore the city. Neither shall we ignore their works.
Together with reflections on social diversity, environmental stakes, traffic congestion, violence in ghettoes, and excitement over the London Olympic Games, we will relish Scorsese’s films, set in New York City, ponder in front of Hogarth’s diptych on ‘Gin Lane’ and ‘Beer Alley’, wonder why Blake wanted to ‘[build] Jerusalem / In England’s green and pleasant land’, and try to locate Strawberry Fields. Coursework material will also include songs (from Elvis Presley to Arctic Monkeys), novels (1984 and other urban dystopias), and articles (by Kevin Lynch, among others).

Modalités d'évaluation : Evaluation will take the form of one oral presentation in class + homework (one piece of creative writing) + final exam. Participation will be taken into account for the final mark.

Dernière mise à jour : lundi 12 décembre 2011