GEOG3041
LANDSCAPE AND POWER
Convenor to be confirmed.
Unit value: 0.5 unit Year 3 Term 2
Brief Course Description
This advanced interdisciplinary course explores the idea of landscape with particular reference to art, cinema and urban design. A commitment to independent critical reading and also an interest in visiting galleries will be essential. The course is also available to MSc students and students from other departments. There will be three main parts to the course: part 1 will explore the evolution of the landscape idea with particular emphasis on art in Europe and North America; part 2 will focus on the role of nature and landscape in urban design; and part 3 will consider cinematic representations of landscape.
Course Aims
Students will have an opportunity to develop their critical and intellectual skills in the fields of landscape interpretation, urban studies and interdisciplinary approaches within the visual arts.
Course Content
Topics to be covered: emerging concepts of nature and landscape in Western thought (Humboldt, Rousseau and key Enlightenment thinkers; the Berkeley School; neo-Marxian approaches); emerging genres of landscape art (Dutch traditions, French impressionism, German expressionism, late twentieth-century Land Art); critical debates over landscape interpretation (romanticism and the sublime; pastoral and counter-pastoral; nationalism, ideology and landscape; feminist and post-colonial insights); the role of landscape in processes of urban design and contemporary processes of urban transformation (contrasting visions of urban nature; gentrification and the urban pastoral); landscape, urban infrastructure and technological modernism; and cinematic landscapes (including neo-realism, European New Wave and examples from the global South).
Method of Teaching
Lectures, seminars and field visits (including galleries).
Form of Assessment
90% written examination and 10% oral presentation
Pre-requisites and Relationships with other Courses
A strong interest in architecture, cinema and the visual arts is essential. The course will assume some background knowledge.
Suggested Preliminary Reading
Malcom Andrews, Landscape and western art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Stephen Barber, Projected cities: cinema and urban space (London: Reaktion, 2002).
Denis Cosgrove, Social formation and symbolic landscape Second Edition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998)
William J. T. Mitchell, ed., Landscape and power. Second Edition. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
