Course Schedule and Catalog

Long Title: INVENTING PARIS: MAKING SPACE IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL CAPITAL

Department: Art History

Grade Mode: Standard Letter

Language of Instruction: Taught in English

Course Type: Seminar

Distribution Group: Distribution Group I

Credit Hours: 6

Description: Beginning with “Grand Paris,” the international architectural competition commissioned by the French President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2008, Inventing Paris will look at the artistic, architectural, cinematic, and mass cultural efforts to (re)invent Paris as a global center within a larger international cultural and financial network. Moving back in time, this class will look at a series of efforts to reimagine Paris as it moves from the capital of France to “the capital of the nineteenth century” (as Walter Benjamin famously put it) to what we could call “the capital of global (cultural/financial) capital.” As we will see, with each successive effort to reimagine and invent Paris, new forms of art, architecture, cinema, literature, etc. give rise to not only new forms of space and imaginary possibilities, but new forms of resistance and critique.