Memory, Media & the City

Collective memory (as well as collective
forgetting or repression) is essential to
understanding urban culture and politics. By
journeying through various cities, we identify how
literature, cinema, urban planning, politics, and
the rhythms of everyday life can be excavated.
Among cities to be discussed: Los Angeles,
Jerusalem, Berlin, Paris, Shanghai, New York,
Beijing, Rome, Las Vegas, Naples. Each of these
has a collective myth beyond its history. But
these myths center around districts that have been
endlessly retrofitted. In the shadow of famous
monuments, the residents adapt to layers of
erasure, failed infrastructure, foreign and
domestic conquests, waves of immigration. Through
the filter of media in particular, we investigate
how these urban-industrial folk images have
evolved; and where cities are headed next. For
example, we will study techniques for "unreliable
narrators" in variations of noir (1928-58; and
neo-noir after 1970)-- as well as archival fact
and fiction across various genres. We will also
decode how the ambient, expressionist setting is
developed-- in cityscapes and in fictions.
Students then apply these discoveries to final
projects involving research into how the facts of
a city are cannibalized as social imaginaries,
from memoirs to archives to journalism, to
scripted spaces.