Wanderings in Psychogeography: Exploring Landscapes of History, Biography, Memory, Culture, Nature, Poetry, Surreality, Fantasy, and Madness
MIT's seminar treats psychogeography as a field to be mapped rather than defined, tracing how walking, wandering, and attention to place have generated a body of writing from Guy Debord's Situationist essays through contemporary novels, poems, films, and creative nonfiction. Readings mix classic texts with recent work, and discussion moves between literary analysis and the practical question of how a person actually experiences and records a city street or a forgotten edge of town. Students conduct their own psychogeographic walks, keeping notes and materials that feed into a final 'carto-imagino-synthetic' project combining mapping, writing, and image to document a chosen place. The course includes a full syllabus, weekly reading assignments, and project guidelines, available free through MIT OpenCourseWare under a Creative Commons license. No certificate is offered, but all course materials are downloadable for self-study.