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The Soul and the City: Art, Literature, and Urban Living

Art represents the city in ways that go beyond quantifiable measures, serving as a record of subjective experience and providing a rich picture of how humans live in cities.
 
 
The City as Container, the Artist as Mapmaker

01: The City as Container, the Artist as Mapmaker

Using William Blake's poem “London” (1793) as an illuminating centerpiece, Dr. Weinstein outlines the fundamentals of city life—anonymity, encounter, exchange, orientation—and goes on to show how works of art—often considered “soft” by social scientists—provide a unique map of these elements, showing us what we cannot see with our own eyes.

46 min
Lost in Space

02: Lost in Space

Arguing that space is the basic medium of the City, Professor Arnold Weinstein discusses key issues of Design and Order, understood in terms of city planning, social philosophy and ancient myths. Of special interest is the potential arrogance of city building, especially those examples of “grand design” foisted on Nature, such as St. Petersburg and Washington.

46 min
The Marketplace

03: The Marketplace

Dr. Weinstein focuses on the living conditions of 18th-century London, as represented in the fiction of Defoe and the paintings of Hogarth, in order to guage the unprecedented freedoms, constraints and ethical challenges made possible by the new mercantile urban order.

46 min
The Family Plot, or Municipal Bonds

04: The Family Plot, or Municipal Bonds

Plot entails connection, the linking together of discrete elements into a causal pattern. This elemental dynamic is at the heart of much fiction, and it is particularly at home in city art. 19th-century artists and writers, attuned to the crisis in “family values” produced by early capitalism, wrestle incessantly with the unmaking and making of the family in the city.

47 min
Urban Apocalypse

05: Urban Apocalypse

Going back to the Old Testament and Boccaccio and forward to Camus and Bergman, Dr. Weinstein sketches out the ramifications of the Destroyed City, with special attention to the role of plague and its modern equivalent, nuclear war. Against this backdrop of destruction and disappearance, the saving graces of memory, language and art appear.

46 min
Transmission and Storage

06: Transmission and Storage

This lecture articulates the master plot of the entire series: the city as the place where the flow of history, culture and information is passed on—living—to human beings. Cities are not only repositories of history, they are the locus of a vital chain of being, and they make available to their inhabitants something of the rich store of the past.

46 min
The Industrialized City and the Machine Vision

07: The Industrialized City and the Machine Vision

Very often the city engages artists and writers because of its energy, vitality and technological power. Yet, the human corollary of such an urban scheme is frequently anomie, alienation and anonymity. Art offers us a privileged optic on this drama; drawing on Leger and Lang, Melville and Rilke, Munch and Hopper.

49 min
A Movable Feast

08: A Movable Feast

This lecture challenges the argument that the electronic revolution has rendered the city obsolete; as information now moves over the wires, the notion of a place for exchange may no longer be viable. The response to such claims comes from the physical character of our life-in-the-city: we experience buildings, streets, museums, restaurants, theater and, above all, people in rich unmediated ways that no computer can rival.

40 min

Overview Course No. 484

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About

Arnold Weinstein

Literature is not information-driven. Instead, it offers us a unique opportunity to see, even to experience, the subjectivity of others. This adds to our own stock.

INSTITUTION

Brown University
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By This Professor

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