Text and the City (P03026)

? Credit Points : 20 ? SCQF Level : 11 ? Acronym : LLC-P-P03026

Increasingly, we navigate the physical, social and informational environments following a multitude of textual markers, written commands, and text-based cues. The pervasive presence of these visible texts affects our actions and habits, our perceptions and gestures, our thought-world, our language(s) and the modes of our writing(s). With the proliferation of technologies that manipulate text, and the increasingly sophisticated common platform for art, design and writing, for colloquial and formal exchanges, textual practices question the simple opposition of word versus image, and they complicate the relationships of language signs and writing forms to places, landscapes, architecture, technologies of display, and social and cultural contexts of the city. Immersive environments of fast changing, visible (and interactive) everyday texts demand new modes of investigation and new ways of conceptualization.

The notion of the city as a legible text has been contemplated since the XIX century: Baudelaire saw the emerging modern city as a forest of symbols; Kracauer considered the deciphering of the hieroglyphics of spatial images as the basis of social reality; Benjamin observed that the metropolis demanded special kind of reading; and for Barthes, the city is a poem () which unfolds the signifier. Linguistics, semiotics and literary theory have supplied concepts for urban analysis, and literature and film have provided narratives, figures, metaphors and models for investigating the complexities of the city, its landscapes, aesthetics, poetics, and traumas. This course engages the concept of the city as text with the material and visual presence of language

Entry Requirements

? This course is not available to visting students.

Subject Areas

Home subject area

Common Courses (School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures), (School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, Schedule G)

Delivery Information

? Normal year taken : Postgraduate

? Delivery Period : Semester 2 (Blocks 3-4)

? Contact Teaching Time : 2 hour(s) per week for 10 weeks

Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes

At the end of the course students will:
- be able to conduct analysis of the graphic forms of writing in their urban context;
- learn to critically evaluate established theories and methods for the study of the relationship between text and the city;
- learn new theoretical instruments for studying texts and images and analyse their relationship to different cultural and disciplinary traditions;
- be able to research, analyse and interpret complex multimodal material;
- learn to analyse and critically assess specific forms of urban writing (graffiti, advertising,
inscriptions, logos) as well as technologies that implicate or rely upon visible texts;
- develop skills in relating theory to the analysis of the material manifestations of textual practices and graphic and spatial dimensions of textual artefacts;
- learn to examine urban space and interpret the city in relation to its multitude of textual and intertextual forms.