INVENTING PARIS: MAKING SPACE IN THE AGE OF GLOBAL CAPITAL

Credit Hours: 6 · Undergraduate Upper-Level

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.