106-034 Imagining the City: Dream, Fact, Style

Formerly available as 106-242/342. Students who have completed 106-242 or 106-342 are not eligible to enrol in this subject.

Usually 25 points of first-year English, see Prerequisites.

This subject explores some of the ways in which life in cities has been envisaged in Western literature, with attention to visionary and realistic elements and to the styles in which these are presented. Students will engage with a variety of texts, contemporary and otherwise, to explore the representation of the city as a powerful site of imagination and identification. Students who complete this subject successfully will have a general knowledge of images of the city generated in the set texts and be able to discern the main stylistic elements in the writings.

Class participation, and written work totalling 4000 words.

• I Calvino, Invisible Cities. Paladin.
• C Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby. Penguin.
• M McCarthy, The Stones of Florence and Venice Observed. Penguin.
• Shakespeare, Henry IV 1 & 2. Penguin.
• J Swift, Gulliver's Travels. Viking/Penguin.
• Virgil, D West (trans), The Aeneid. Penguin Classics.