Soul and the City: Art, Literature, and Urban Living (Audiobook)

We spend our lives building in empty spaces. Out of nothing, we make something. We fashion jobs, relationships, structures, and meanings. Without these creations, we would live in a wasteland. The Soul and the City: Art, Literature, and Urban Living is not a compendium of statistics on city life, a guidebook, or a historical look. This course focuses on complex artistic representations of city life from the 18th to the 20th century. Brown University's Professor Weinstein (Ph.D., Harvard University) selects particular moments and cities to illustrate urban themes such as anonymity, orientation, and exchange. You visit St. Petersburg just before the Russian revolution, the industrial age in the novels of Charles Dickens, and the present global electronic era on the cinematic screen. Professor Weinstein serves as a literary theorist, cultural critic, and philosopher. Portraits of humanity come through several great artists in a variety of mediums: "We can think of the city artist as a mapmaker, subjectively representing these themes by surveying and chronicling the urban environment," states Professor Weinstein. "But why use art as a guide to city life? Art usually supports what we learn from scientific studies of urban life. Art provides us with something social science cannot: a subjective rendering of city experience that is not quantifiable. Such a depiction includes our fears, desires, and dreams. Art serves as a record for these experiences." Dr. Weinstein has been teaching courses on European, English, and American literature at Brown University since 1968. He has received the Younger Humanist Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a Fulbright Senior Lecturer Award. He is the director of an NEH-funded program in Great Books. In 1995 he received Brown University's award as best teacher in the humanities. Brown's Student Course Evaluations, summarizing the results of end-of-year surveys, reported: "By far, students' greatest lament was that they only got to listen to Professor Weinstein once a week."

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