Cities of Modernity : the self in the city Conference 1 - Evaluation : Paper ; choisir une image, un texte ou un film sur

le XIXme sicle, un sur le XXme ou XXIme sicle. Les commenter en deux pages chacun. Les comparer, de quelle manire sont elles complmentaires en deux pages. CF syllabus. - Tutorial Friday morning 8-10h. no lecture 28 septembre, 26 octobre.
1. Introductory Class Description of the methodology to be used, the description of the mid-term paper and exam which will both be based on an analysis of one text and two images, a comparison of the two images and the text and a synthesis of all three. Advice on how to choose the text and images for the mid-term. Explanation of the bibliography and the brochure and advice on how to use them. Practical demonstration of how to analyse and synthesize written and visual documents. Explanation of how the aesthetics of an image or the poetics of a piece of writing reflects an ideological standpoint and that every work of art positions the reader or viewer in a certain way and ascribes a position or ideological standpoint to him or her. Reading images and viewing text: theories Image: - William Logsdail, St. Paul's and Ludgate Hill, 1887, oil on canvas, 28 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. (73.3 x 55 cm.). - C.R.W. Nevinson, Amongst the nerves of the world, 1930, oil on canvas, 75.3 x 50 cm (unframed) 98 x 72.5 cm (framed) Extracts for class: - Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852), Chapter 1 In Chancery Bibliography: - Nead, Lynda, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. - Dickens, Charles, Bleak House [1852-53], Nicola Bradbury, Terry Eagleton (eds.), London: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Commentaire de William Logsdail, St. Paul's and Ludgate Hill, 1887, oil on canvas, 28 7/8 x 19 7/8 in. (73.3 x 55 cm.). Already have the feeling of photography. Photographic technologies influenced the way people paint. A moment time. Capturing a particular movement in the city. CF Caillebotte exhibition. Big black bridge: dividing the picture. Down below industrial traffic. When we move up, we can see a kind of sphere (dome). The train: new communication. Down Below, misery. At the top, the cathedral is in a kind of feerical space. Idea of heavens. Idea that with technologies we loose a kind of heavens. Idea of distancing; Religion in backstage The bottom and the top of the picture are very different, a kin of soft focus.

Difference between Christian communication, and new communications: A line going up directly with god for old communication; the train implies the idea of network, horizontal communication. Man at man; change the people organized themselves. The clock. Reflection on the time. New notion to the time. Jet lag. Different forms of time are suggested: the clock (do with punctuality, time of man and his activity); opposed to the time of god (old spiritual time of god), the light of the sky. Whats being lost, whats being gained. The sky is not empty but already inhabited! The telegraph! Idea of the conquest of the sky, the sky gradually becoming a space of communication. The intuition of mail and mobile communication.

Commentaire de C.R.W. Nevinson, Amongst the nerves of the world, 1930, oil on canvas, 75.3 x 50 cm (unframed) 98 x 72.5 cm (framed) Same standpoint: The train is much more in the back. The train looks like old now! It is now no more aggressive. Stuck in the background. Idea that the division of the world works. Kind of Cubism. What history do we see?

Production of advertisement. Much more efficient, the idea that the city is much more efficient. Before we could project fantasies in the sky; but in this painting, the sky looks like fracturing like a slashed mirror. No more empty at the top we can see three pigeons! The clocks are not here anymore. They look uncomfortable! Commentaire de Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, 1852
CHAPTER 1 IN CHANCER

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest. Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls deified among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds. Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time--as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look. The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick, never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds this day in the sight of heaven and earth.

First paragraph: Very Dostoyevsky like: deep and dark. Looks like the bottom of the Logsdail painting. Huge metaphor for dysfunctional British society. First word of the novel: London. You stay in it, the novel is structured as a jail! He drops conventional syntax. No sentence, but statement. Giving the feeling of inescapable, implacable, unchangeable London, very bleak. Parallel with the bible. the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth. To the geneses. Reference to the evolution of Darwin megalosaurus (idea of the struggle to survive. The world is into mourning (en deuil) Making a superb amalgam between the struggle to survive (Darwinism and geneses) and capitalism. Schopenhauer vision of human being. Negative vision of making money compound interst Second paragraph and last paragraphs: idea that the mud insinuates itself everywhere and contaminate the world. Reference to the hoar of Jerusalem. Bleak House, the idea of the worst house. Conclusion: - the system of communication is based on jostling (ide de lute et de rivalit) ; dickens text is a text of non cooperation. Capitalism is a dark and individual time. Brave new world, metropolis; posterity, never happy ending. - contrast with blade runner