Syllabus
Information regarding the 2021 summer semester:
Courses will take place in the online MsTeams environment due to the covid-19 pandemic. The link to join the MsTeams team for this subject will be distributed to all registered participants.
WEEK ONE: INRODUCTION
WEEK TWO: INTELLECTUALS AND THE CITY
Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees, The Making of Urban Europe, chapter 8: The Human Consequences of Industrial Urbanization
Carl E. Schorske: The Idea of the City in European Thought: Voltaire to Spengler
Georg Simmel: The Metropolis and Mental Life
WEEK THREE: EAST CENTRAL EUROPE GOES INDUSTRIAL: ŁÓDŹ
Agata Zysiak et al.: From Cotton and Smoke, chapter one
The Promised Land by Andrzej Wajda
WEEK FOUR: CONSTRUCTING an IMPERIAL CAPITAL: VIENNA
Carl E. Schoerske: The Ringstrasse and Its Critics
WEEK FIVE: CONSTRUCTING a NATIONAL CAPITAL: BUDAPEST
Peter Hanak: Urbanization and Civilization
John Lukacs: Budapest 1900, chapter 2
WEEK SIX: The LANGUAGE of ARCHITECTURE
Anthony Alofsin: When Buildings Speak, chapter 1: The Language of History
WEEK SEVEN: The LANGUAGE of MEMORIES
Walter Benjamnin: Berlin Childhood
Czesław Miłosz: The City of my Youth
WEEK EIGHT: A CONTESTED CITY: LVIV
Hugo Lane: The Ukrainian Theatre and the Polish Opera
Aleksander Łupienko, Localness, Identity, and the Historic City. New Elites in the Autonomous Galician Lviv
WEEK NINE: MUNICIPALITY and the STATE
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Annotation
The Idea of the City in East Central Europe (1850s – 1950s)
This course explores the transformations of the social and intellectual imagination in East Central Europe in the period of the rapid urban growth in the second half of the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century. This growth was related to remarkable changes in social structures, political life, and popular imagination.
The problems discussed will involve the issues of the perfect and the odious urban space, the new class divisions and inequalities, nationalist claims clashes and imperial representation projects. The students will be asked to search for analogies between the patterns of development of various East Central European metropoles
– from St. Petersburg to Vienna – and the ideological controversies they provoked. We shall search for the specificity of the development of a number of urban centers in the region – imperial and national capitals, as well as local centers – and for the specificity of the urban development in East Central Europe as a whole.
Various types of evidence will be analyzed during in-class discussions: literary fiction, essays, pamphlets, and movies. Students will be asked to analyze them as historical evidence.