Seminar “Urban Imaginaries” (Summer 2015)

Prof. Dr. Jens Martin Gurr

University of Duisburg-Essen

Department of Anglophone Studies

Please note:

Participants are expected to have read ALL the texts marked with an x above BEFORE THE

SEMINAR BEGINS (there will not be enough time during the week)!

Further texts and fields of study will be agreed upon in the seminar depending on the

interests of participants.

Table of Contents

Overview and “Classics” x Setha M. Low, “Introduction: Theorizing the City” (2005) 1

x Georg Simmel, “The Metropolis and Mental Life” (1903) 21

x Kevin Lynch, from The Image of the City (1960) 25

Conceptual/Theoretical Texts x James A. Throgmorton, “Planning as Persuasive Storytelling in a Global-Scale Web of Relationships”

(2003) 35

Leonie Sandercock, “From the Campfire to the Computer:

An Epistemology of Multiplicity and the Story Turn in Planning” (2010) 63

Merlijn van Hulst, “Storytelling, a model of and a model for planning” (2012) 84

Hubert Zapf, “Literature as Cultural Ecology” (2001) 106

x Jens Martin Gurr, “Urbanity, Urban Culture and the European Metropolis” (2010) 114

Martin Butler/Jens Martin Gurr, “Urbane Populärkultur als Bewertungspraxis und -ressource”

(2014) 129

William Sharpe/Leonard Wallock, “From ‘Great Town’ to ‘Nonplace Urban Realm’:

Reading the Modern City” (1987) 146

Case Studies/Material on Individual Literary Texts, Films, Documentaries …

x Frederick Burwick, “Tom and Jerry; or, Life in London: Urban Representations and

Mirror Reflections” (2011) 178

x Jens Martin Gurr, “The Modernist Poetics of Urban Memory and the Structural Analogies

between ‘City’ and ‘Text’: The Waste Land and Benjamin’s Arcades Project” (2015, in press) 186

x Norman M. Klein, from The History of Forgetting: The Erasure of Memory in Los Angeles (2008) 203

x Marcus Hartner, “Psychogeography and In/Sanity: Walking London, New York, and Dubai with

Will Self” (2011) 217

x Berit Michel, “Urban Identity in a State of Flux: Strategies of Representing

Simultaneity, Chaos, and Complexity in Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (2011) 233

Bond Love, “‘Architectural jungle” or the ‘sum of its people’: Policing Post-War

Urban Space in Anthony Mann’s Side Street” (2011) 257

x Alexandra Ganser, “Navigating Little Italy: Carceral Mobility in Martin Scorsese’s

Mean Streets” (2011) 274

x Karin Höpker, “The Cab and the City: Chance Encounters and Certalian

Perspectives in Jim Jarmusch’s Night on Earth” (2011) 290

Rüdiger Kunow, “City of Germs: Biological Identities and Ethnic Cultures in the Metropolis” (2011) 306

Jens Martin Gurr, “Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation” (2013) 325

x Jens Martin Gurr, “The Politics of Representation in Hypertext DocuFiction: Multi-Ethnic

Los Angeles as an Emblem of ‘America’ in Norman M. Klein’s Bleeding Through:

Layers of Los Angeles 1920-1986” (2011) 344

x Jens Martin Gurr, “Urban Complexity from a Literary and Cultural Studies Perspective:

Key Cultural Dimensions and the Challenges of ‘Modeling’” (2014) 358

Literary Texts:

John Denham, from Coopers Hill (1642) 380

William Wordsworth, from The Prelude (1805/1850) 381

x T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922) 383

Alan Brownjohn, from “Ode to Centre Point” (1972) 391

x Paul Auster, from The City of Glass (1985) 393