AU kursuskatalog arkiv

Out of the City, Back to the Land: The Anti-Urban Impulse in Late-19 ^th - and Early-20 ^th -Century British and American Culture, Literature, and Film

In the years before and after the turn of the nineteenth century, cities in Europe and North America grew at an unprecedented rate. In this period, the giant city (or metropolis) became the symbol of industrialized western modernity in its most advanced and problematic state, and the consequences of urban growth became highly charged topics for discussion and controversy. City life represented a radical shift in human society, and by extension, a radical shift in human consciousness as well. Perceived in radically contradictory terms, at once utopian and dystopian, the world city both promised the beginning of a new liberated civilization and threatened a regression to social, moral and cultural barbarism. Many modern artists, including Poe, Whitman, Joyce, Woolf and the Italian futurists, embraced the metropolis and sought to write their enthusiastic versions of it. Others, however, were prone to emphasize the perceived deficiencies of urbanity compared to life in more placid rural surroundings. World War I created a political climate that reinforced distrust of the great city and fostered the exploration of alternatives. Rampant urbanization rekindled older anxieties about urban living, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, as cities drew fire from a diverse and vocal group of writers, critics, planners and intellectuals.

This seminar will track the unfolding of Anglo-American critique of the city in various discursive domains around 1900, seeking to understand anti-urbanism's intellectual, historical and political roots. Who, we will ask, were the most vocal and prominent urban critics of the day, and why did they feel so threatened? Did British and American anti-urban intellectuals form a homogenous group, or can we identify different styles of anti-urban discourse? To what extent did anti-urbanists simply reject the city, perhaps resorting to outmoded romantic escapism, and to what extent did they seek to develop more viable reformist alternatives to urbanization as it was taking shape? The seminar is transnational and interdisciplinary in scope, engendering a conversation across the following forms, disciplines and genres:

• Urban sociology and cultural critique (by Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies, Robert E. Park, Louis Wirth, Lewis Mumford):
• Homesteading narratives (by H. D. Thoreau, Ralph Brosodi, Scott and Helen Nearing)
• Utopia and Anti-Utopia (by Edward Bellamy, W. D. Howells, H. G. Wells, William Morris)
• Urban planning (by Ebenezer Howard, Patrick Geddes, Peter Kropotkin, Frank Lloyd Wright)
• Fiction (by E. M. Forster, Jean Toomer, John Dos Passos)
• Film (by F. W. Murnau, Paul Strand /Charles Sheeler, Fritz Lang, Charlie Chaplin, King Vidor)