Archive for category The City
From contribution to collaboration: Refugee Week and the value of seeing like a city
Posted by cathannabel in Refugees, The City on June 17, 2013
by Jonathan Darling, Geography, University of Manchester
Today sees the start of Refugee Week 2013, an annual celebration of the contribution of refugees to the UK that seeks to promote better understanding of why people seek sanctuary. Refugee Week has been held annually since 1998 as a response to negative perceptions of refugees and asylum seekers and hostile media coverage of asylum in particular (Refugee Week 2013).
The rebuilding of Paris and its reflection in works by Zola, Verne and Hugo
Posted by cathannabel in Literature, The City on April 27, 2013
Décombres de l’avenir et projets rudéraux : les métamorphoses de Paris chez Verne, Hugo et Zola
Claudia Bouliane's recently published MA dissertation is available online as a PDF.
The abstract is as follows :
Between 1853 and 1870, many areas of the French capital are torn down to allow the establishment of new avenues by Baron Haussmann, Paris’ prefect under Napoleon III.
Michel BUTOR & l'espace entre 2 villes
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, The City on April 25, 2013
On n'est pas le même partout. L'équilibre entre 2 villes ; deux pôles ; et ce qui les relie : un fil de la vierge léger léger : le trajet en train. Il y a longtemps que cette vieille édition rose de 1994 (achetée sur conseil : "tu aimes le train, c'est un roman à lire dans le train, d'autant que tu prends souvent cette ligne" (fut un temps avec arrêt à Firenze, ville non mentionnée il me semble dans le roman)) passe d'étagère en étagère.
The Original Modern
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, The City, W G Sebald on April 3, 2013
by Brian Rosa, PhD candidate in Geography
Manchester is a city of superlatives: it was the prototypical “shock city” of the Industrial Revolution, Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx’s model for everything that was abhorrent in the industrial capitalist city, and one of the birthplaces of the labor and women’s suffrage movements. In its heyday, Manchester was depicted in literature of Engels, Alexis de Toqueville and later the paintings of L.S.
Pierre ALECHINSKY & les plans de Paris (& Cherbourg)
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, The City, Visual Art on March 15, 2013
Comme je me renseigne sur Alechinsky, sa vie son œuvre, je finis par trouver des dessins sur plans - de Paris (ça me revient : "tu sais Alechinsky, il a utilisé des cartes comme support, ça devrait t'intéresser"). Je sélectionne ici les arrondissements que je connais mieux.
L'arrondissement de ma naissance.
L'arrondissement du Lycée.
L'arrondissement de l'université.
Je trouve aussi ces impressions de Cherbourg.
Butor and Sebald – brief further thoughts
Posted by cathannabel in Michel Butor, The City, W G Sebald on January 19, 2013
I’ve written previously about the relationship between Bleston and Manchester, and about the links between Butor and Sebald, and I’ve just been exploring the fascinating collection of essays on Sebald in Melilah, the Manchester Journal of Jewish Studies, alerted by Helen Finch’s recent blog about Sebald’s Manchester. It’s good to see the link with Butor explored a bit more, but I would have to take issue in some respects with Janet Wolff’s article, ‘Max Ferber and the Persistence of Pre-Memory in Mancunian Exile’, which I think fails to fully identify the deeper connections between the two writers.
I would agree that Passing Time is not about Manchester in a straightforward way but I think Wolff takes that too far when she says that ‘none of this is about an actual city’, and that Revel’s diatribes against Bleston are ‘the ravings of a neurasthenic, whose debilitated psychological state produces monsters in the environment’. (p. 52) This is not a new charge – reviewers have in the past diagnosed Revel with depression or schizophrenia. But I’d argue that rather than alerting us to an unreliable narrator, the mismatch reminds us that Bleston is not just Manchester, not just any particular city. It contains many cities, real and fantastical.
But it is based more upon Manchester in its physical reality than on any other city, and contrary to Wolff’s statement that ‘there are no physical descriptions at all (quite unlike the Manchester of ‘Max Ferber’)’, there are many descriptions of Manchester landmarks, as J B Howitt has shown (in his article ‘Michel Butor and Manchester’, even though Butor takes and uses those features which are relevant to him, and changes or ignores those that are not.
What interests me most, however, is Wolff’s argument that the Manchester of The Emigrants fades into insignificance in relation to ‘another geographical, phantasmic and persistent presence’.
My studies of Butor are concerned precisely with identifying that presence in Passing Time. More anon.
- Janet Wolff, ‘Max Ferber and the Persistence of Pre-Memory in Mancunian Exile’, in Melilah, 2012 Supplement 2, Memory, Traces and the Holocaust in the Writings of W.G. Sebald. (Guest editors: Jean-Marc Dreyfus and Janet Wolff)
- http://helenfinch.wordpress.com/2013/01/13/the-roman-road-under-the-casino-lost-manchester/
- J B Howitt, ‘Michel Butor and Manchester’, Nottm French Studies, 12 (1973), 74-85
Drawing a square upon the ground: the complexity of memory in a changing environment
Posted by cathannabel in The City, Visual Art on May 23, 2012
Guest blog by Annie Harrison.
This article draws on the work Annie is doing for her MA by Research in Art Practice at MIRIAD, Manchester Metropolitan University and an associated artists’ residency at Lime, an arts and health organization. Annie also works as a Project Assistant in the School of Medicine at the University of Manchester.
My art practice is concerned with place and memory.
Cartier-Bresson in Liverpool
Posted by cathannabel in The City, Visual Art on May 5, 2012
Passing through one of the rooms of the Walker Art Gallery recently I happened to notice, in the corner, a small display of photographs - some by Henri Cartier-Bresson alongside others by local photographer Edward Chambre Hardman. I was surprised to discover that not only had the great French photographer visited Liverpool in the sixties to make a TV documentary about the north, but that he had taken photographs less than half a mile from where I now live.
reading loop, wasteland planning, sound art
Posted by cathannabel in Music, The City on May 3, 2012
The next reading loop (Wednesday, May 2nd, 7pm, Bloc studios) will be a more experimental workshop, thinking through how a wasteland might be re-thought (and perhaps re-made?) through sound. We'll be asking not 'What do we want to see in this space?', but: 'What do we want to hear in this space?' The discussions will feed in to the broader project to develop a live project in a wasteland in the Shalesmoor area of Sheffield.
Engaging with the city's past
Posted by cathannabel in The City on April 3, 2012
A number of the discussions we've had about the city over the last two years have touched on how we engage with its past. We've discussed post-traumatic urbanism through the lens of Lebbeus Woods' War and Architecture (see also the fascinating exhibition of Woods' early drawings) and have also begun to think through our engagement with (or perhaps literal and/or conceptual avoidance of) recent sites of trauma in the city.
