LLSL3409

This course examines the representation of city life in an array of modern literary, cultural, and cinematic guises. We read the fiction of Vicki Baum, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, George Orwell, Dawn Powell, Viktor Shklovsky, Virginia Woolf, among others, while turning our attention to the essays and critical writings of Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. We also explore a selection of plays by Eugene O'Neill and Bertolt Brecht and films by Fritz Lang, Walter Ruttmann and Dziga Vertov. Among the chief questions raised in the course is the extent to which the aesthetic rendering of modern life is bound up with the urban experience. This course satisfies the approaches to literary studies requirement for Literary Studies majors.