HCRT-240: Roads

More than just connecting elements, roads divide and define landscape, become test cases for our relationships with speed and mobility, and structure travel narratives that range from ritual pilgrimage to the hitchhiker's opportunistic ramblings. While cities, towns, and buildings - even symbolic landscapes - fit within traditional assumptions about what makes a place and invests it with meaning, roads, because they are designed with movement in mind, provide an alternative to stasis and settlement. They're figures and systems more than places, and as such they have their own rules. This course will look at roads and highways as elements of narrative and infrastructure, exploring how they fit into contemporary discussions of movement and landscape drawn cultural studies, philosophy and systems organization. Topics covered will include speed, organization, nomads, dystopia and the picturesque. We will look at and discuss maps and historical sources, film, literature, painting and photography and try to understand what roads do and how we experience them.