Contemporary Literature: Street Haunting in the Global City
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this literature seminar pairing novels and essays about city walking with the practice of urban exploration itself. Readings likely include Virginia Woolf's essay that gives the course its title, along with other writers who treat the city as a text to be read, re-read, and gotten lost in. Discussions track shared concerns between walking and reading: pacing, legibility, transgression, attention and distraction, tracing and retracing, and memory. The course is structured to loop back on itself, returning students to texts covered earlier in the semester so that rereading becomes both the subject and the method. Materials include the syllabus, reading list, and assignments as published by MIT OpenCourseWare. There is no instructor video lecture series; the course is presented as a self-study set of course materials, free to access with no certificate offered.