Q26: Describe and analyse works (drama, theatre, film and visual arts) which represent the modern city. Interpret their historical and cultural references.

Question 1

How did Dickens view the modern city?

Answer 1

central London = dirt, poverty, crime (because of overpopulation)
the streets = muddy, claustrophobic
CITY: simultaneously crowded and isolating

Question 2

Describe the image of the city in William Hogarth’s “Gin Lane”.

Answer 2

• industrial revolution
• jungle of cities
• social collapse, ethical fall (depravation)
• depiction of alcohol abuse (i.e. cheap gin)
• scene set in the slums, includes a drunk mother dropping her baby to drink
• city of horror: ppl are addicted to alcohol and their lives are ruined

Question 3

What is “modern city”?

Answer 3

• early 20th century
• the city becomes a spectacle of modernity (with technology, mechanization, urban development)
• a shift from village to urban settings: modernism found its natural habitat in the city, in cosmopolitan centres: money, leisure, the noise of many languages

Question 4

Give examples of different images/portrayals of the modern city.

Answer 4

• city as labyrinth (James Joyce’s “Ulysses”)
• city as an organism, independent creature (surrealist perspective)
• city as a ‘shock’ experience (Baudelaire’s flaneur, Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro”)
• city as cultural chaos: melting pot of classes
• city as intensifier of human emotions (often contradictory: alienation and community, etc.)

Question 5

How did Lewis Hine present the city in his photographs?

Answer 5

• city abusing the children

- strong criticism of employing children for profit

Question 6

What image of the city is presented in Charlie Chaplin’s “Modern City”?

Answer 6

• dehumanizing aspects of the city (factories focus only on efficiency)
• in order to fit into the city you have to become a machine yourself
• city as a place of poverty, unemployment, strikes, intolerance, economic inequalities, crime and tyranny
• city as intensification of noise, sensation, etc.
• machines have replaced human jobs

Question 7

What image of a city is presented in DC’s Batman comic books/films?

Answer 7

• city of chaos and anarchy in the streets
• city of contrasts/binary oppositions (light-dark, good-evil, etc.)
• city as no place for God (abandoned cathedrals)
• city as a place of hopelessness and crime