Ellul, Jacques The Meaning of the City

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO

COL 5037S SLA SLA325F

MAGIC PRAGUE

QUESTIONS OF LITERARY CITYSCAPE

Fall 2016

We Graduates 9-12

Undergraduates 10-12,
INSTRUCTOR: Veronika Ambros

Phone: [phone], ext. 3200

Office Hours: Wednesday 4-5, St. Joseph Street Alumni Hall, #405,

Wednesday 12-1 Centre for Comparative Literature BT; or by appointment

Email:[e-mail]



     

Prague as a meeting point of different cultures attracted a variety of artists and scholars. Inspired by the book Magic Prague by the Italian literary scholar Angelo Ripellino (English 1994), this class explores the myth of Prague in selected works by Jan Neruda, Franz Kafka, R.M. Rilke, Paul Wegener, G. Apollinaire, B. Hrabal, and others. A number of secondary texts will help to discuss questions of literary cityscapes, of center and margin, of multiculturalism and nationalism in different periods.
Readings in English and for the specialists in the original.
Requirements:

Undergraduate students:

Attendance and participation - 10%

2 essays (5 pages, 30% each) - 60%

10 reader responses every class - 30% due every Monday at noon

Deadlines:

First essay: October 17

Second essay: November 28

Graduate students:

Attendance and participation: 10%

Presentation: 20%

1 essay (20 page) 50%

Deadline: December 5

10 reader responses every class - 20% due Monday noon

The written assignments have to follow the MLA guidelines: www.mlahandbook.org https://style.mla.org/works-cited-a-quick-guide/2018-03-15

https://style.mla.org/ 2018-03-15
The following books can be purchased:

Neruda – Prague Tales

http://www.amazon.com/Prague-Tales-Central-European-Classics/dp/9639116238
Ripellino – Magic Prague

http://www.amazon.com/Magic-Prague-Angelo-Maria-Ripellino/dp/0330337793
Weil – Life with a Star http://www.amazon.com/Life-Star-Jewish-Lives-Jiri/dp/0810116855
Kundera – Ignorance

http://www.amazon.com/Ignorance-A-Novel-Milan-Kundera/dp/0060002093/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408124915&sr=8-1&keywords=0060002093

Program

1 September 14 Introduction
2 September 21 Legends and Poetry
All

Jirásek, Alois, Old Czech Legends 1992 4-30; “Tales of the Ghetto” 101-112.

Ingeborg Bachmann, "Prague, January '64" 140

---. "Bohemia Lies by the Sea" 141

Paul Celan, "In Prague" 138

Allen Ginsberg, "Kral Majales" 150

František Halas, "Mala Strana Night Vision" 93, "Prague" 94

Nazim Hikmet Faust’s House,

Vítězslav Nezval, "City of Spires" 88, "Prague with Fingers of Rain" 90

Philippe Soupault, "To Prague" 85

in Delbos, Stephan ed. From a Terrace in Prague A Prague Poetry Anthology Prague, Litteraria Pragensia, 2011
Daniela Hodrová “I See a Great City…” In Prague, Paul Wilson, ed., San Francisco: Whereabouts Press, 1995, 3-10.
Michael Huig, “Prague 1900. From Provincial Capital to Metropolis” Prague 1900 : poetry and ecstasy / Edwin Becker, Roman Prahl, Petr Wittlich editors. Amsterdam : Van Gogh Museum ; Zwolle : Waanders Uitgevers, 1999, 9-22.

Graduates

http://fairuselab.net/accessibility/walter-benjamin-the-return-of-the-flaneur-1929/accessed 02/09/2012
Viewing: Student from Prague /Golem
3 September 28 The City as a Small Town
Undergraduates How Mr. Worel broke..,“Mr. Rysanek and Mr.Schlegel, Three Lilies „
Graduates Jan Neruda Prague Tales [Povídky malostranské]
Additional Readings:
Thomas Ort . " Prague 1911 ". Art and Life in Modernist Prague . (May 2013); 31–60. Palgrave Macmillan. 29 August 2016.

Graduates

Certeau, Michel de. “Walking in the City” The Practice of Everyday Life. 1984, Berkeley and Los Angeles, California London. England. University of California Press, 91-110

4 October 5 Multiculturalism and Nationalism

Rainer Maria Rilke “Hradčany“, „Out of Smíchov“ Delbos 36-7;

J.S.Machar Old Town Square“ Delbos 83,

A. Sova „Old and new Prague“, Delbos 34-35.

Rainer Maria Rilke “King Bohusch” in Two Stories of Prague, Foreword7-54
Additional Readings:

Peter Zusi"Wie ein Kind ist unser Volk": Hybrid Identity and National Consciousness in Rilke's "Zwei Prager Geschichten" The German Quarterly, Vol. 79, No. 3, Focus on Literature around 1900 (Summer,2006), pp. 329-346

Graduates Mikhail Bakhtin, „Chronotope“ 243-258
5 October 12 City as Tourist Attraction
All

Seifert, Jaroslav “The Plague Monument”  Cross currents. Volume: 3 (1984), pp. 135-146

Guillaume Apollinaire “The Wandering Jew” [Le Passant de Prague], New York, Doubleday, 1967, 3-16.
---.“Zone” “It’s Raining” In Guillaume Apollinaire Selected Writings. Roger Shattuck, transl. New York New Directions Pub. Corp., 1971, 116, 170-171.

Graduates

Roland Barthes “Semiology and Urbanism” In. Roland Barthes The Semiotic Challenge. New York: Hill and Wang, 1988: 191-20.

6 October 19 Prague between Reality and Imagination
All

Franz Kafka Description of a Struggle – [Beschreibung eines Kampfes], In Franz Kafka The Complete stories, New York, Schocken, 9-51.

Additional Readings:

Rolf Tiedemann " Kafka Studies, the Culture Industry, and the Concept of Shame: Improper Remarks between Moral Philosophyand Philosophy of History” Cultural Critique 60 (2005) 245-258

Graduates

Deleuze Gilles and Guattari Félix ”What is a Minor Literature?” – In Mississippi Review, Vol. 11, No. 3, Essays Literary Criticism (Winter/Spring, 1983), 13-33 http://www.jstor.org/stable/20133921/ accessed 05/09/2012

Franz Kafka “Diary” Excerpt in Anderson, Mark (ed.). Reading Kafka. Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siècle. New York: Schocken, 1989: 259-262.
7 October 26 Hašek’s Prague and her “Mental Life”
All

Jaroslav Hašek “The Society for the Purging of Prague” “A Psychiatric Mystery”; In: Jaroslav Hašek  view details

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Little stories by a great master; Radko Pytlík ed; trans. Doris Kožišková; Vladmir Procházka illustrations. Prague: Orbis Press, 1984.
Additional Reading:

Kosik, Karel: “Hašek and Kafka” Cross currents Volume 2 (1983), pp. 127-136.

Simmel, Georg, “The Metropolis and the Mental Life” In: The Blackwell City Reader. Gary Bridge and Sophie Watson eds., Malden, Oxford, and Melbourne: Blackwell, 2002, 11-19.
Graduates Jaroslav Hašek The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War part I; [Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války. English.] Transl. Cecil Parrott. London: Heinemann, 1973.

8 November 2 Prague as the Set of the Process

All

Franz Kafka The Trial [Der Proceß ]

Graduates

Goebel Rolf, “The exploration of the modern city in The Trial“ In The Cambridge Companion to Kafka. Julian Preece ed. University of Kent at Canterbury Cambridge University Press 2002 42-60.

9 November 9 Magic Prague

Suggested Viewing Svankamejer Faust

All
Karel Čapek. “The Poet”, The Experiment of Professor Rous,” “The Footprints” in Tales from two pockets; translated from the Czech and with an introduction by Norma Comrada. Povídky z druhé kapsy. North Haven, Catbird Press, 1994, 54-64, 85-91, 128-136.
Undergraduates Angelo Ripellino Magic Prague Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994, pp. 122-149.

Graduates Part I
Additional Reading:

Jorge Luis Borges “The Secret Miracle” Labyrinths, Toronto, New Directions, 1962: 88-94.

Derek Sayer “Modernism, Seen from Prague, March 1937” Artl@s Bulletin Volume 3Issue 1, 19-29.

10 November 16 Stars in the Golden City
Jiří Weil Life with a Star

Rupnow Dirk “ Ihr müßt sein, auch wenn ihr nicht mehr seid ”: The Jewish Central Museum in Prague and Historical Memory in the Third Reich January 2002, Holocaust and Genocide Studies16(1)Volume16(Issue1) Page p.23-53

Connerton, Paul. “Seven Types of Forgetting.” Memory Studies 1.59 (2008): 59-72.
Graduates
de Certeau, Michel (1985) 'Practices of Space', in Marshall Blonsky (ed.), On Signs (The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland, 1985)
Viewing:

Veit Harlan Die Goldene Stadt [The Golden City, 1942]

11 November 23 The “Belly” of Prague
All

Bohumil Hrabal To Loud a Solitude Cross currents. Volume 5(1986), pp. 278-332.

Cross Currents http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=crossc;cc=crossc;q1=Hrabal%2C%20Bohumil;rgn=author;view=image;seq=00000290;idno=ANW0935.1986.001;node=ANW0935.1986.001%3A25
Hrabal, Bohumil. Want to See Golden Prague? Cross currents. / 1990, Volume: 9 (1990), pp. 407-411
Additional Readings:

Peter Stalybrass, “The City: the Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch” The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, New York Cornell UP, 1993. 125-147

Graduates

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Michel Foucault, info. Web. 20 April 2013.

12 November 30 Nostalgia for Prague?

Suggested Viewing Oratorio for Prague and Josef Kylian

Kundera Milan Ignorance Linda Asher Trans. New York:HarperCollins, 2002

Gleber, Anke “Female Flanerie and the Symphony of the City. In Women in the Metropolis Katharina von Ankum ed. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, 67-88.

Additional Readings:

Graduates

Jáchym Topol Výlet k nádražní hale = A trip to the train stationAlex Zucker, trans. illustroval Michal Cihlář. Praha : Plus, 2011

Hana Wirth-Nesher. “Impartial Maps: Reading and Writing Cities” Handbook of urban studies [electronic resource] / edited by Ronan Paddison. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif. : SAGE, 2001. 52-66

Selected Readings

Primary Texts

Borges Jorge Luis “The Secret Miracle” Labyrinths, Toronto, New Directions, 1962: 88-94. Print

Čapek K. Tales from two pockets; translated from the Czech and with an introduction by Norma Comrada.North Haven, CT : Catbird Press, 1994. Print

---. Čapek Four Plays; translated and introduced by Peter Majer and Cathy Porter. Plays. English. Selections. London: Methuen Drama, 1999. Print

Delbos, Stephan ed. From a Terrace in Prague A Prague Poetry Anthology Prague, Litteraria Pragensia, 2011. Print.

Harlan Veit Die Goldene Stadt [The Golden City, 1942], Film

Hašek Jaroslav The Good Soldier Švejk and his Fortunes in the World War part I; [Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války. English.] Transl. Cecil Parrott. London: Heinemann, 1973. Print.

---.  view details

 mark

 request

 email

 print

 save

 cite

 text

 mylibrary

 refworks

Little stories by a great master [compiled by Radko Pytlík ; translation by Doris Kožišková ; illustrations by Vladmir Procházka]. Prague: Orbis Press, 1984. Print.

Hodrová Daniela. “I See a Great City…” In Prague, Paul Wilson, ed., San Francisco: Whereabouts Press, 1995, 3-10. Print.

Hrabal Bohumil To Loud a Solitude Cross currents. Volume 5(1986), pp. 278-332.

Cross Currents http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/pageviewer-idx?c=crossc;cc=crossc;q1=Hrabal%2C%20Bohumil;rgn=author;view=image;seq=00000290;idno=ANW0935.1986.001;node=ANW0935.1986.001%3A25

---. Want to See Golden Prague? Cross currents.  Volume: 9 (1990), pp. 407-411

Kafka Franz The Trial. Mike Mitchell. trans, introduction and notes Ritchie Robertson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print

---. The Complete stories, Nahum Norbert Glatzer. Trans. New York, Schocken, Schocken Books, 1995, 25-74. Print

Kundera Milan Ignorance Linda Asher Trans. New York:HarperCollins, 2002. Print

Madsen Ole Christian Prague. 2006. Film. Print

Machar J.S.Old Town Square“ In. Delbos 83

Neruda Jan Prague Tales   Michael Henry Heim translated; introduction Ivan Klíma. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1996. Print

Rilke Rainer Maria “King Bohusch” in Two Stories of Prague, Angela Esterhammer, trs., intro. 7-54,Hanover, N.H. : University Press of New England, 1994. Print

---.“Hradčany“, „Out of Smíchov“ Delbos 36-7.

Sova A. „Old and new Prague“, Delbos 34-35.

Weil Jiří Life with a Star; preface Philip Roth ; Rita Klímová with Roslyn Schloss trans. [Život s hvězdou]. New York: Penguin Books, 1991. Print

Wegener Paul. Der Student von Prag. 1913. Film. Or Der Golem wie er in die Welt kam. 1920. Film.

Secondary Sources
Anderson, Mark (ed.). Reading Kafka. Prague, Politics and the Fin de Siècle. New York: Schocken, 1989.

Bachelard, Gaston. Etienne Gilson (foreword) The Poetics of Space..Boston: Beacon Press,1964 <1958>

Bakhtin Mikhail “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin and London: University of Texas Press. 1981: 243-258.

Barthes, Roland „Semiology and Urbanism“ in The Semiotic Challenge. Richard Howard (trans.) New York: Hill and Wang, 1988 <1985>: 191-201.

Becker, Sabina. Urbanität und Moderne. Studien zur Großstadtwahrnehmung in der deutschen Literatur 1900 – 1930. St. Ingbert: Röhrig, 1993.

Benjamin, Walter. „Paris, die Hauptstadt des XIX Jahrhunderts“ Illuminationen. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1977: 170-184.

---. “The Return of the Flâneur” (1929) [Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings II 1927-1934. Trans. Rodney Livingstone et al. Eds. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1999.]

http://fairuselab.net/accessibility/walter-benjamin-the-return-of-the-flaneur-1929/accessed 02/09/2012

Becker, Veronika. Das emotionale Moment der Veränderung. Stadt als Dichtung. Bonn: Bouvier, 1999.

Bridge Gary and Watson Sophie eds. The Blackwell City Reader. Malden, Oxford, and Melbourne: Blackwell, 2002

Brodsky, Boris “The Psychology of Urban Design in the 1920’s and 1930’s,” The Journal of Decoration and Propaganda Art, 1987, no 5:81

Burton Richard. Prague : a cultural history Northampton, MA : Interlink Books, c2009.

Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities. London: Picador, 1979.

Caws Mary Ann: City Images,New York Gordon and Breach, 1991

Demetz, Peter. Prague in Black and Gold. Scenes from the Life of a European City. New York: Hill and Wang, 1997.

---. René Rilkes Prager Jahre. Düsseldorf: Diedrichs,1953. PT 2635I65Z663

---. Prague in Danger : the Years of German Occupation, 1939-45, Memories and History, Terror and Resistance, Theater and Jazz, Film and Poetry, Politics and War. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.

Doležel, Lubomír. Narrative Modes in Czech Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1973.

Ellul, Jacques. The Meaning of the City. Grand Rapids Mich: Eerdmans, 1970.

French Alfred. Czech writers and politics 1945-1969. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 1982.

---. The Poets of Prague: Czech Poetry between the Wars. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.

Gelley, Alexander. “City Texts: Representation, Semiology, Urbanism.” In Politics, Theory and Contemporary Culture. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.

Gleber, Anke “Female Flanerie and the Symphony of the City. In Women in the Metropolis Katharina von Ankum ed. Berkeley, University of California Press, 1997, 67-88.

Gottdiener, M. and Alexandros PH. Lagopulos, eds. The City and the Sign. An Introduction to Urban Semiotics. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986.

Kosík, Karel. “Hašek and Kafka, or, the World of the Grotesque” in The Crisis of Modernity. Essays and Observations from the 1968 Era. James H. Satterwhite, ed. London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1995: 77- 86. DB 2218.7K671995

Lehan, Richard The City in Literature, An Intellectual and Cultural History. Berkeley, U pf California Press, 1998

Lotman, Yuri M. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture.Trans. Ann Shukman. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990 Miles Malcolm Cities and Cultures London, Routledge, 2007.

Ripellino, Angelo Mario. Magic Prague. Trans. David Newton Marinelli. Ed. M .H. Heim. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.

Sayer, Derek. The Coasts of Bohemia. A Czech History. Princeton: Princeton U. P., 1998.

---.. (2002) “Surrealities.” In: Central European Avant-Gardes: Exchange and Transformation 1910-1930. Los Angeles County Museum of Art/MIT Press.

Spector, Scott. Prague Territories. National Conflict and Cultural Innovation in Franz Kafka’s Fin de Siècle. Berkeley University of California Press, 2000.

Squier, Susan Merill. Women Writers and the City. Knoxwille: University of Tennessee Press, 1984.

Stalybrass, Peter “The City: the Sewer, the Gaze and the Contaminating Touch” In The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca, New York Cornell UP, 1993.

Wechsberg, Joseph. Prague. The Mystical City. New York: Macmillan, 1971.

Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

Wilson, Paul, Prague, San Francisco: Whereabouts Press, 1995

Wirth-Nesher, Hana. City Codes. Reading the Modern Urban Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

---. “Impartial Maps: Reading and Writing Cities” Handbook of urban studies [electronic resource] / edited by Ronan Paddison. London ; Thousand Oaks, Calif. : SAGE, 2001. 52-66