Soul and the City: Art, Literature, and Urban Living

by Arnold Weinstein

Course Lecture Titles
1. The City as Container, the Artist as Mapmaker
2. Lost in Space
3. The Marketplace
4. The Family Plot, or Municipal Bonds
5. Urban Apocalypse
6. Transmission and Storage
7. The Industrialized City and the Machine Vision
8. A Movable Feast

Genres: Nonfiction, Audiobook, History, Art, Education, Philosophy, Literature

7 pages, Audio Cassette

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Dr. Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor at Brown University, where he has been teaching for over 35 years. He earned his undergraduate degree in Romance Languages from Princeton University and his M.A. and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. Among his many academic honors, research grants, and fellowships is the Younger Humanist Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a Fulbright Senior Lecturer Award as a visiting professor at Stockholm University, Brown University's award as best teacher in the humanities, Professeur InvitÈ in American Literature at the Ecole Normale SupÈrieure in Paris, and a Fellowship for University Professors from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Professor Weinstein is the author of many books, including Fictions of the Self: 1550ñ1800 (1981); Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo (1993); and A Scream Goes Through The House: What Literature Teaches Us About Life (2003). Northern Arts: The Breakthrough of Scandinavian Literature and Art from Ibsen to Bergman (Princeton University Press, 2008), was named one of the 25 Best Books of 2009 by The Atlantic. Professor Weinstein chaired the Advisory Council on Comparative Literature at Princeton University, is the sponsor of Swedish Studies at Brown, and is actively involved in the American Comparative Literature Association.

Reviews

[Matthew Huff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Although he pulls the skirt a bit high on his francophilia (lots of French phrases and somewhat obscure details), Weinstein is a brilliant lecturer and thorough observer of the true greatness of art. Several moments of this series fascinated me and drew me in to his views on film, art, and literature that reflect urban dilemmas and distresses. I admire Weinstein, and there was much in this series to enjoy.

[Tracy Rowan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m a city girl. I love Chicago and have lived here all my life. I can barely imagine living anywhere else, though Copenhagen is a close second. I found this survey of how art describes the city to be fascinating, even though it’s mainly focused on European cities, and then on the city in previous centuries.

It’s a dark course, at least in part because the city is a dark concept in many ways. Urban crime, urban grime, the manner in which isolation increases in a city environment (I don’t find that true, but then I’m an introvert for whom the city provides just enough contact with others.) Art describes this as surely as it does the vibrancy of the city, and the way the arts flourish within it.

Professor Weinstein is an excellent guide, citing not only literature, but fine arts, film, and every other art form that has been used to express what the city is. This is one of the shorter Great Courses I’ve listened to, but there is so much material here, that the sources would make for months of reading and viewing if you found yourself wanting to explore the subject more deeply and broadly.

As with most of the Great Courses, I recommend this one unreservedly.

[David · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh -- a six-hour series of lectures which I got free of charge as a Audible member.

As mentioned by other reviewers, the presenter has some odd verbal tics (lip smacking, clicking), refers to unseen visuals, and often resorted to French phrases. The lecturer is certainly a man of deep learning but his musings on what various writers, artists, essayists, etc., have said about urban living doesn't seem to hang together around a common theme.

At the very beginning of the lecture series, the lecturer refers to a brutal rape of a jogger in Central Park, New York City. At the moment he was speaking (approx. 1990), it was a recent event, and a handful of young men were accused of the crime and vilified in the court of public opinion. The lecturer holds this up as an example of the barbarity of the modern city. With the benefit of hindsight, we know that the young men were falsely accused. As a result, we can consider this event not as an example of the barbarity of the modern city, but as an example of jumping to conclusions based on incomplete information and assumptions about color and race.

Probably the weakest lectures series of lectures from The Great Courses that I've listened to.

[Wiebke (1book1review) · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't think that this lecture worked on audio, as there were many pictures discussed that I couldn't look at as I was out and about while listening. Also it wasn't very good to listen to, as I could hear too many mouth smacking and swallowing noises from the professor.

[Ivy-Mabel Fling · Rating 5 out of 5]

This has more to do with art and literature than urban living (in my view) but it is a very interesting overview of books and films (mainly) that describe cities and urban existence. It is certainly entertaining.

[Tom Axworthy · Rating 4 out of 5]

These 8 lectures assess constructs or characteristics of urban life by through the lens of artistic expression. The lectures are a bit dated now since they were recorded in the 1990s( Professor Weinstein makes references to then contemporary issues like the Gulf War) but his method of using art to highlight the role of cities in our civilization is imaginative. He uses William Blake's great poem on London, for example, to explore how anonymity is a basic characteristic of urban life( how many of us know our neighbors?), Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders to look at cities as marketplaces of exchange, Hogarth's famous 18th century engraving of "Gin Lane" to show the temptations and sin of city life.His last lecture on the " Moveable Feast" begins with Hemingway's account of life in Paris in the 1920s but uses the title to make the point that industries have moved out of cities because technology allows commerce to be practiced anywhere so cities might be losing their centrality as locales for market exchange.A well organized and imaginative set of lectures for anyone interested in urban studies or the role of art.

[Alex Shrugged · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost gave this audio course 2 stars because I didn't particularly like the professor's voice, and he made clicking noises on occasion as he was speaking. The content was reasonable if not particularly interesting to me. I almost thought this was going to be some liberal rant on the horrors of urban living caused by those terrible political people (whoever they are). But, it turned out to be a look at art and literature that gave us a close look at city life during those times. As I said, a reasonable subject if not particularly exciting.

I doubt I will listen to this audio course again. I will probably give the professor another chance with a different course such as "Classics of American Literature".

[Lenka Příplatová · Rating 5 out of 5]

A surprisingly fascinating listen. I’ve never really thought about cities from this angle, and this course opened up a whole new way of seeing how urban spaces shape human life — and how they’ve been shaped in return. I had no idea, for example, that the ancient world actually mocked the idea of designing a city with straight lines, or that those grand Parisian boulevards were built partly so revolts could be controlled more efficiently. Things like that kept catching me off guard in the best possible way.

I definitely won’t remember every historical detail, but the overall shift in perspective is going to stay with me. It made me notice patterns in urban planning I’d never paid attention to, and it connected literature, culture, and physical space much more tightly than I expected. A genuinely enriching listen, even if I came for the art and ended up thinking about street grids.

[Gebo · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like Weinstein's courses usually, but this one is kind of all over the place and feels contrived. It's basically just him relating city life to literature with little to bound it together, at least in my approximation. Boring and feels disjointed and haphazard. I had to push myself to finish it.

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though this course is sold with an audio-only option, video would be better since a Professor Weinstein refers to some paintings as he makes his points about the city through the arts.

[Dylan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wasn't anything I didn't like, but also nothing that really stuck out. Didn't really dig too much into much of a thesis on how art and the city interact

[JanaT · Rating 3 out of 5]

More of musings rather than lectures, interesting though.

[Brenden Gallagher · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nice survey course about urban art that is a tad brief and a bit broad but enjoyable nonetheless.

[Mack · Rating 4 out of 5]

As the lecturer says, these visions of art and the city are more often dark than not, but, still, these explorations through and with art and the city are inspiring and enlightening. The art includes paintings, writing, architecture, history, but no music.