In this seminar we explore the history, present, and future of psychogeography, hoping to map the center and the edges of this elusive field and to pioneer potential new directions and applications for the principles we discover (or invent) along the way. We discuss classic and more recent texts—including novels, essays, poems, reviews, films, and other works of creative nonfiction and speculative fiction. Students also undertake their own psychogeographic wanderings and complete a final “carto-imagino-synthetic” project to document, describe, map, and otherwise “make sense of place” through these techniques.

This ebook provides the outlines for a course on world cinema since 1965. Goals, assignments, topics, and online resources are all provided. Another textbook could be used in conjunction, but this could work by itself. 

This semester, we will read writing about travel and place from Columbus’s Diario through the present. Travel writing has some special features that will shape both the content and the work for this subject: reflecting the point of view, narrative choices, and style of individuals, it also responds to the pressures of a real world only marginally under their control. Whether the traveler is a curious tourist, the leader of a national expedition, or a starving, half-naked survivor, the encounter with place shapes what travel writing can be. Accordingly, we will pay attention not only to narrative texts but to maps, objects, archives, and facts of various kinds.
Our materials are organized around three regions: North America, Africa and the Atlantic world, the Arctic and Antarctic. The historical scope of these readings will allow us to know something not only about the experiences and writing strategies of individual travelers, but about the progressive integration of these regions into global economic, political, and knowledge systems. Whether we are looking at the production of an Inuit film for global audiences, or the mapping of a route across the North American continent by water, these materials do more than simply record or narrate experiences and territories: they also participate in shaping the world and what it means to us.
Authors will include Olaudah Equiano, Caryl Philips, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Joseph Conrad, Jamaica Kincaid, William Least Heat Moon, Louise Erdrich, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca.
Expeditions will include those of Lewis and Clark (North America), Henry Morton Stanley (Africa), Ernest Shackleton and Robert F. Scott (Antarctica).

powerpoints of the first seven chapters of the cinema scenes film history text

In this presentation from the Institute of Film and Television Studies' Ephemeral Media Workshops, Professor William Uricchio discusses his research: The recurrent, recombinatory and the ephemeral: thoughts on a textual system in transition.

Presentation produced/delivered: June/July 2009

Suitable for: Undergraduate Study and Community Education

Professor William Uricchio, MIT/Utrecht

William Uricchio is Professor and Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He has held visiting professorships at Stockholm University, the University of Science and Technology of China, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Philips Universität Marburg; and Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt fellowships have supported his research.

Professor William Uricchio considers the interplay of media technologies into cultural practices, and their role in (re-)constructing representation, knowledge and publics. In part, he researches and develops new histories of 'old' media (early photography, telephony, film, broadcasting, and new media) when they were new. And in part, he investigates the interactions of media cultures and their audiences through research into such areas as peer-to-peer communities and cultural citizenship, media and cultural identity, and historical representation in computer games and re-enactments.

His most recent books include Media Cultures (2006 Heidelberg), on responses to media in post 9/11 Germany and the US, and We Europeans? Media, Representations, Identities (2008 Chicago). He is currently completing a manuscript on the concept of the televisual from the 17th century to the present