Metropolitan Modernisms

Here's the new course for the Spring 2012:

                                             

German 592                                                                           TR 2:30 to 3:45

Professor Daniel Purdy                                                        409 Burrowes Building

This course will interpret literature, film, architecture and theory from the last 150 years in order to examine the production of spaces within modern metropoli, concentrating fore mostly on Berlin, with additional texts and films about Paris, New York, Beijing and Shanghai.  We will ask questions such as:  How do places within a city acquire a specific ethnic, sexual, political or economic meaning?  What artistic techniques represent the experience of street life best?  How important are urban spaces for the operation of a political public sphere?  What does it mean to “occupy” a place? 

Our approach will compare modern industrial cities to one another.  We will first trace the formation of Berlin modernist aesthetics and then consider its global legacy in the 21^st century.  Paris and Moscow will be important to understanding the modernism of Weimar Germany in the 1920s.  New York, Chicago, Beijing, and Shanghai will mark different stages in the diffusion of this early twentieth-century Modernism.

We will read German texts in relation to foreign cities.  We consider the implications of Walter Benjamin (Arcades Project) and Siegfried Kracauer (Straßen in Berlin) fascination for Paris.  New York and Chicago will be discussed in regards to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the Bauhaus architecture of Walter Gropius and Mies van der Rohe.  Spaces marked in terms of alternative sexualities will be considered in Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen, Magus Hirschfeld’s Transvestiten and Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin Stories.  We will read film theory on montage and the experience of urban streets, drawing connections between Russian revolutionary cinema and modernist experimental prose (Döblin and Musil). 

Our readings will survey theories of urbanity from Georg Simmel to Rem Koolhaas, Marc Augé, and Ackbar Abbas.  Finally we will conclude with contemporary discussions of “the European city” as a reaction against globalization generally and the example of China’s rapid urbanization specifically. We will discuss the places of historical preservation and memorialization in Berlin and Beijing by considering Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and Peter Eisenman’s Holocaust memorial in Berlin.  By way of contrast we will consider architectural debates about preserving traditional urban spaces in China and contemporary Chinese films such as Ning Ying’s I love Beijing.