F0306 Modernism and the City: London, Paris, Venice

The spectacle shock, speed, rush and crowds of Urban life are at the center of modernist aesthetics. Indeed many modernist texts are not only metropolitan works but ones in which the city emerges as something like a central \"character\". In this course we will examine the ways in which a range o flate-nineteenth-century and twentieth-century writers attempted to come to terms with the experience of modern life through their representation of three European cities (London, Paris, and Venice). In doing so we will ask how the practice of writing the city, of recording its multitude of impressions, of consuming its spectacles, of delighting in it as a flanneur and of losing oneself in its crowds, structure some of modernism\'s fundamental cultural an aesthetic protocols.