Instructors: D. Antoniou and M. Gumpert
This course examines the way particular spaces – cultural, urban, literary – serve as sites for the production and reproduction of cultural and political imaginaries. It places particular emphasis on the themes of the polis, the city, and the nation-state as well as on spatial representations of and responses to notions of the Hellenic across time. Students will consider a wide range of texts as spaces – complex sites constituted and complicated by a multiplicity of languages – and ask: How central is the classical past in Western imagination? How have great metropolises such as Paris, Istanbul, and New York fashioned themselves in response to the allure of the classical and the advent of modern Greece? The question of space and the site-specific will also be raised by the very logistics of the course, which will link two classrooms, two groups of students, and two professors – one at Columbia University, and the other at Boğaziçi University, by way of long-distance technologies. This course fulfills the global core requirement.
