Steven D Hoelscher

The purpose of this course is to explore the ways in which cultural memory has shaped, and continues to shape, urban life in one specific place: Vienna, Austria. For individuals and groups alike, memory forms an essential component of social identity. Cultural memory is produced in various forms—from memorials, public art, and commodities to popular culture, rituals, and museums. Yet, in many cases, the very symbols meant to preserve memory are, in fact, equally successful in helping people forget the past.

Course is restricted to students in the Maymester Abroad Program.

The purpose of this course is to explore the ways in which cultural memory has shaped, and continues to shape, urban life in one specific place: Vienna, Austria. For individuals and groups alike, memory forms an essential component of social identity. Cultural memory is produced in various forms—from memorials, public art, and commodities to popular culture, rituals, and museums. Yet, in many cases, the very symbols meant to preserve memory are, in fact, equally successful in helping people forget the past.

Course is restricted to students in the Maymester Abroad Program.

Among the world’s major cities, Vienna, Austria, stands out as a place where the past remains a uniquely powerful shaper of collective identity—an identity that is also shaped by equally powerful forces to forget that very past. The urban landscapes of Vienna have long been inscribed by layers of collective remembering and forgetting: the city’s famous nineteenth-century Ringstraße, with its monumental government, educational, religious, and cultural institutions was constructed with memories of older building traditions clearly in mind; while avant-garde architects and artists who followed explicitly rejected connections to the past. From Sigmund Freud’s influential theories of the psychological unconscious to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s efforts to create a distinctly ahistorical philosophical system, Viennese thinkers have been at the vanguard of debates about the power of memory. And the profound upheavals of the Second World War and the Holocaust further fractured collective remembering, leading to Vienna’s deep ambivalence to recent history. Today’s Vienna, fully immersed in a global political-economy, bears witness to the deep impress of the past in the contemporary world.

The purpose of this course is to study the ways in which cultural memory has shaped, and continues to shape, urban life in one specific place: Vienna, Austria. For individuals and groups alike, memory forms an essential component of their social identity; by definition, it involves sharing, discussion, negotiation, and conflict. Cultural memory is produced in various forms—from memorials, public art, and commodities to popular culture, rituals, and museums—and is inevitably anchored in cities. Museums and memorials, for example, have been historically built as official places of memory in prominent cities to communicate a sense of national history and citizenship. Yet, due to the distinct interests of diverse social groups, these urban pasts are open to multiple interpretations that, in many cases, lead to willful and organized forgetting.

Our study of cultural memory in Vienna will explore the city’s changing cultural landscapes during four important periods during its modern development. We will see, for example, how the different layers of Austria’s history have literally become part of the Viennese built environment. We will also visit the many museums that house the artifacts and visual culture so important to Vienna’s collective memory, and we will attend opera and theater performances that call forth the city’s unique heritage.  This kind of direct exploration, and the course requirement of daily reflections on these structures and spaces, can only be done on-location, where students have the opportunity to explore the terrain of memory. With Vienna as our laboratory, students will examine theoretical discussions of memory and the city in a provocative geographical setting.

Texts:

Inge Lehne and Lonnie Johnson, Vienna: The Past in the Present

Course Reader

Assignments:

25%     Place Notes: A Daily Fieldwork Journal

25%     One 30-minute guided commentary for the entire class of one site, structure, museum, etc

10%     One 1-hour exam

40%      Participation in all city tours and class discussions

American Studies/Geography

  CONSTRUCTING THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

Spring 2010                                            Prof. Steven Hoelscher

AMS 390/GRG 396T                               Office: BUR 430, Th 2-5 pm

T, 2-5 pm                                                Phone: 232-2567

BUR 436B                                               Hoelscher@mail.utexas.edu                                                                             

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Few concepts offer more insight into the construction of, and frequent conflict over, group and personal identity than landscape.  More than simply a pleasing view of scenery, landscape denotes the interaction of people and place—a social group and its spaces, particularly the spaces to which the group belongs and from which its members derive some part of their shared identity and meaning. In this graduate seminar, we will unpack the variety of meanings of landscape from two distinct, but mutually reinforcing, perspectives: the landscape that we usually associate with environment; and the idea or representation of landscape.  People, working in different places and influenced by social class, race, gender, and political ideology, create distinctive landscapes that reflect these social divisions.  Likewise, and often for rather different reasons, people choose to produce representations of those landscapes in art and literature, and at historic sites and monuments.  Specific themes, among others, include: racialized and gendered landscapes; environmental preservation; landscape photography; landscapes of violence and tragedy; historical memory; and the writerly art of landscape description.

CLASS FORMAT

This course will be conducted as seminar with open discussion of the assigned readings and other course materials. I expect that students will come to class well prepared to present and respond to discussion questions and ideas about the readings. 

REQUIRED READING LIST  

John Brinkerhoff Jackson, Landscape in Sight: Looking at America

Daphne Spain, How Women Saved the City

Owen Dwyer and Derek Alderman, Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory

Richard Walker, The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area

Anne Whiston Spirn, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field

RECOMMENDED BOOKS

Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape

Denis Cosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscape

Please note that both sets of books are available at Co-Op Bookstore.  Finally, several articles will also be required, and are indicated below as *. I have placed these in the Course Documents section of our class Blackboard site so that you will be able to download them wherever you find convenient, and at minimal or no cost.

COURSE EVALUATION

Percent                         Task Description

30                                6 weekly critical essays (no more than 1 page in length)

10                                landscape description/interpretation (roughly 5 pages)

20                                seminar participation and facilitation of discussion

40                                term paper and presentation (roughly 15-20 pages)

Weekly critical essays: The first component of your grade will be based on weekly essays that you will turn in each Tuesday.  The critical essays (or précis) should be short, concise summaries of the articles and your reflections on them.  This means not simply summary, but also some thoughtful response and intellectual reflections to the readings. As the semester progresses, I hope that you might start making comparisons to earlier readings, and to note differences or similarities in perspectives. What’s important to each author, and why? What theoretical perspectives, political viewpoints, and methodological tools did the author rely on? What do you think of the author’s points, and why?

Over the course of the semester, I ask that you write six of these short essays. While there are seven discussion weeks, you will need to write essays on only six of them.

Landscape Interpretation: For week 8 (March 9) I would like you to describe a landscape here in Texas.  The essay should not be especially long – something on the order of five typed pages – but it should be grounded in empirical investigation, critical thought, and evocative writing.

Participation and leading a class discussion: You will be asked to prepare and lead a discussion during the semester, which will draw on our reading.  I ask that you prepare discussion questions to be distributed before our class meeting, and help facilitate the actual discussion.

Term paper and presentation: The fourth component of the course evaluation is the completion and presentation of a research paper.  The paper should engage a number of the theoretical perspectives and empirical problems that have formed the foundation for this class. Ideally, your term paper should connect to your dissertation or thesis research; if you have not yet decided on a topic, perhaps this paper could be an exploratory essay. Either way, I want it to be relevant for your graduate work. During one of the last two class meetings (April 27 and May 4) you will make a brief presentation on the results of your research/writing efforts.  All term papers are due no later than Tuesday, May 4.

COURSE CONTENT

Week 2, January 26: Introduction to the Course

* Lewis, Peirce F. “Axioms for Reading the Landscape: Some Guides to the American Scene.” In The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes, edited by D.W. Meinig, 11-32. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979.

Week 3, February 2:  Foundations: Definitions, Traditions, and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea

Jackson, J.B. “The Word Itself.” In Landscape in Sight: Looking at America, edited by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, 299-306. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

* Sauer, Carl. “The Morphology of Landscape.” In Land and Life: A Selection of Writings of Carl Ortwin Sauer, edited by John Leighly, 315-350. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963 [1925].

*Mitchell, Don. “California: The Beautiful and the Damned.” In The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape, 13-35. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996

* Cosgrove, Denis. "Prospect, Perspective, and the Evolution of the Landscape Idea." Transactions, Institute of British Geographers N.S. 10 (1985): 45-62.

Week 4, February 9:  J.B. Jackson and the Invention of an American Landscape Tradition

Jackson, John Brinkerhoff. Landscape in Sight: Looking at America. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.  Be sure to read Horowitz’s introduction: “J.B. Jackson and the Discovery of the American Landscape,” ix-xxxiv.

Week 5, February 16: Protecting Landscape

Walker, Richard. The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay Area. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008.

Week 6, February 23: Visualizing Landscape

Spirn, Anne Whiston. Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange’s Photographs and Reports from the Field. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

Week 7, March 2: No Class/Writing Week

Week 8, March 9: Writing Landscape, 1: Seeing, Thinking, Describing Landscapes

(Landscape interpretations due.  Do not write a review essay)

* Relph, Edward. “Seeing, Thinking, Describing Landscapes.” In Environmental Perception and Behavior: An Inventory and Prospect, edited by Thomas Saarinen, et al, 209-224. Chicago: The University of Chicago Dept. of Geography, Research Paper No. 209, 1984.

* Lessard, Suzannah. "The Split: An Intersection Where Opposite Worlds Collide." The New Yorker, 8 December 1997, 72+.

*Sinclair, Iain. Selection from London Orbit. A Walk Around the M25. London: Granta 2002.

Week 9, March 16: Spring Break

Week 10, March 23: Landscape and Gender

Spain, Daphne. How Women Saved the City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.

Week 11, March 30: Landscape and Race

Dwyer, Owen J. and Derek H. Alderman. Civil Rights Memorials and the Geography of Memory. Chicago: Center for American Places, 2008

Week 12, April 8 (Thursday): Writing Landscape, 2: a lunch with Iain Sinclair

Please note that class will not meet on Tuesday of this week, but instead we will have a lunch meeting at the HRC with noted psychogeographer and landscape sleuth, Iain Sinclair.

Week 12, April 10 (Saturday): Landscape and Memory: Field Trip to the Alamo

Half day Field Trip to San Antonio. Details TBA

*Miguel De Oliver. “Historical Preservation and Identity: The Alamo and the Production of a Consumer Landscape.” Antipode 28, no. 1 (1996): 1-23.

Week 13, April 13: No Class/Writing Week

Week 14, April 20: No Class/Writing Week

Week 15, April 27: Research Presentations

Week 16, May 4: Research Presentations/Final Papers Due