City as Character

What would Paris be without Notre Dame de Paris, Verona – without Romeo and Juliet, St. Petersburg – without Crime and Punishment? The list is to be continued. What does city have to do with literature? Is it a place at which literature is written? Or is it a place into which literature is written? Is it merely a setting for a story or the source, the generator of it?

In this course we will learn how literature draws from places and then creates literary places: we will plunge into the ongoing spiral of recreation and reconstruction in which myth and reality are intermingled and are constantly generating each other. We will see how the image of the city shapes its literature and how, in its turn, its literary counterpart affects the city’s reality. We will visit St Petersburg, Paris, Istanbul and Mumbai bypassing malls and tourist information points; our guides will be authors and their characters, our pictures – metaphors and epithets, and our maps – literary maps.

We will discuss the concepts of topos, myth, symbol, and poetics in literature and will learn to identify those in the text. We will get acquainted with the concept of intertextuality and its role in formation of literary places. We will explore the city as a microcosm of human society, the embodiment of its many aspirations: cultural, political, and interpersonal. We will analyze what literary techniques are used to express those. We will also touch upon the question of genre: how is city image affected by the genre of literary work and vice versa? What are the purposes, effects and confines of a literary genre; when and why do they become flexible?

The main goal of this course is to teach students read other than the plot, see characters other than people (or those behaving as people – animals, speaking objects, elves, etc.), and be aware of the process of creating meaning in words.

Satisfies General Education Requirements:

• Group-Satisfying: Arts and Letters
• Multicultural Courses: International Cultures (IC)